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THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


































Swing twenty paces out from one another and. circle this shack ! 





PRAIRIE MOTHER 


By 

ARTHUR STRINGER 


AUTHOR OF 

The Prairie Wife, The House of Intrigue 
The Man Who Couldn’t Sleep, etc. 


ILLUSTRATED BY 

ARTHUR E. BECHER 


INDIANAPOLIS 

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS 


Copyright 1920 

The Pictorial Review Company 


Copyright 1920 
The Bobbs-Merrill Company 



Printed in the United States of America 



press or 

BRAUN WORTH h CO. 
BOOK MANUFACTURERS 
BROOKLYN. N. Y. 


\s 

JlJN fg 2o ' ' 

©CI.A570516 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 








* 






# 















































The Prairie Mother 

Sunday the Fifteenth 

I opened my eyes and saw a pea-green world all 
around me. Then I heard the doctor say: “Give ’er 
another whiff or two.” His voice sounded far-away, 
as though he were speaking through the Simplon 
Tunnel, and not merely through his teeth, within 
twelve inches of my nose. 

I took my whiff or two. I gulped at that chloroform 
like a thirsty Bedouin at a wadi-spring. I went down 
into the pea-green emptiness again, and forgot about 
the Kelly pad and the recurring waves of pain that 
came bigger and bigger and tried to sweep through 
my racked old body like breakers through the ribs of 
a stranded schooner. I forgot about the hateful metal- 
lic clink of steel things against an instrument-tray, 
and about the loganberry pimple on the nose of the 
red-headed surgical nurse who’d been sent into the 
labor room to help. 

I went wafting off into a feather-pillowy pit of in- 
finitude. I even forgot to preach to myself, as I’d 
been doing for the last month or two. I knew that my 
time was upon me, as the Good Book says. There are 

1 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


a lot of things in this life, I remembered, which woman 
is able to squirm out of. But here. Mistress Tabbie, 
was one you couldn’t escape. Here was a situation 
that had to be faced. Here was a time I had to knuckle 
down, had to grin and bear it, had to go through with 
it to the bitter end. For other folks, whatever they 
may be able to do for you, aren’t able to have your 
babies for you. 

Then I ebbed up out of the pea-green depths again, 
and was troubled by the sound of voices, so thin and 
far-away I couldn’t make out what they were saying. 
Then came the beating of a tom-tom, so loud that it 
hurt. When that died away for a minute or two I 
caught the sound of the sharp and quavery squall of 
something, of something which had never squalled be- 
fore, a squall of protest and injured pride, of mal- 
treated youth resenting the ignominious way it must 
»enter the world. Then the tom-tom beating started up 
again, and I opened my eyes to make sure it wasn’t 
the Grenadiers’ Band going by. 

^ I saw a face bending over mine, seeming to float in 
space. It was the color of a half-grown cucumber, and 
it made me think of a tropical fish in an aquarium 
when the water needed changing. 

“She’s coming ou , Doctor,” I heard a woman’s 
voice say. It was a voice as calm as God’s and slightly 
nasal. For a moment 1 thought I’d died and gone to 
Heaven. But I finally observed and identified the lo- 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


3 

ganberry pimple, and realized that the tom-tom beat- 
ing was merely the pounding of the steam-pipes in that 
jerry-built western hospital, and remembered that I 
was still in the land of the living and that the red- 
headed surgical nurse was holding my wrist. I felt in- 
finitely hurt and abused, and wondered why my hus- 
band wasn’t there to help me with that comforting 
brown gaze of his. And I wanted to cry, but didn’t 
seem to have the strength, and then I wanted to say 
something, but found myself too weak. 

It was the doctor’s voice that roused me again. He 
was standing beside my narrow iron bed with his 
sleeves still rolled up, wiping his arms with a big white 
towel. He was smiling as he scrubbed at the corners 
of his nails, as though to make sure they were clean. 
The nurse on the other side of the bed was also smil- 
ing. So was the carrot-top with the loganberry 
beauty-spot. All I could see, in fact, was smiling 
faces. 

But it didn’t seem a laughing matter to me. I 
wanted to rest, to sleep, to get another gulp or two of 
that God-given smelly stuff out of the little round tin 
oan. 

“How’re you feeling?” asked the doctor indiffer- 
ently. He nodded down at me as he proceeded to man- 
icure those precious nails of his. They were laughing, 
the whole four of them. I began to suspect that I 
wasn’t going to die, after all. 


4 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“Everything’s fine and dandy,” announced the 
barearmed farrier as he snapped his little pen-knife 
shut. But that triumphant grin of his only made me 
more tired than ever, and I turned away to the tall 
young nurse on the other side of my bed. 

There was perspiration on her forehead, under the 
eaves of the pale hair crowned with its pointed little 
cap. She was still smiling, but she looked human and 
tired and a little fussed. 

“Is it a girl ?” I asked her. I had intended to make 
that query a crushingly imperious one. I wanted it to 
stand as a reproof to them, as a mark of disapproval 
for all such untimely merriment. But my voice, I 
found, was amazingly weak and thin. And I wanted to 
know. 

“It's both,” said the tired-eyed girl in the blue and 
white uniform. And she, too, nodded her head in a tri- 
umphant sort of way, as though the credit for some 
vast and recent victory lay entirely in her own narrow 
lap. 

“It’s both?” I repeated, wondering why she too 
should fail to give a simple answer to a simple ques- 
tion. 

“It’s twins !” she said, with a little chirrup of laugh- 
ter. 

“Twins?” I gasped, in a sort of bleat that drove the 
last of the pea-green mist out of that room with the 
dead white walls. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


5 


“Twins,” proclaimed the doctor, “twins!” He re- 
peated the monosyllable, converting it into a clarion- 
call that made me think of a rooster crowing. 

“A lovely boy and girl,” cooed the third nurse with 
a bottle of olive-oil in her hand. And by twisting my 
head a little I was able to see the two wire bassinets, 
side by side, each holding a little mound of something 
wrapped in a flannelette blanket. 

I shut my eyes, for I seemed to have a great deal 
to think over. Twins! A boy and girl! Two little 
new lives in the world ! Two warm and cuddling little 
bairns to nest close against my mother-breast. 

“I see your troubles cut out for you,” said the doc- 
tor as he rolled down his shirt-sleeves. 

They were all laughing again. But to me it didn’t 
seem quite such a laughing matter. I was thinking 
of my layette, and trying to count over my supply of 
binders and slips and shirts and nighties and wonder- 
ing how I could out-Solomon Solomon and divide 
the little dotted Swiss dress edged with the French 
Val lace of which I’d been so proud. Then I fell to 
pondering over other problems, equally prodigious, so 
that it was quite a long time before my mind had a 
chance to meander on to Dinky-Dunk himself. 

And when I did think of Dinky-Dunk I had to 
laugh. It seemed a joke on him, in some way. He was 
the father of twins. Instead of one little snoozer to 
carry on his name and perpetuate his race in the land, 


6 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


he now had two. Fate, without consulting him, had 
flung him double measure. No wonder, for the mo- 
ment, those midnight toilers in that white-walled house 
of pain were wearing the smile that refused to come 
off ! That’s the way, I suppose, that all life ought to 
be welcomed into this old world of ours. And now, I 
suddenly remembered, I could speak of my children — 
and that means so much more than talking about one’s 
child. Now I was indeed a mother, a prairie mother 
with three young chicks of her own to scratch for. 

I forgot my anxieties and my months of waiting. 
I forgot those weeks of long mute protest, of revolt 
against wily old Nature, who so cleverly tricks us 
into the ways she has chosen. A glow of glory went 
through my tired body — it was hysteria, I suppose, 
in the basic meaning of the word — and I had to shut 
my eyes tight to keep the tears from showing. 

But that great wave of happiness which had washed 
up the shore of my soul receded as it came. By the 
time I was transferred to the rubber-wheeled stretcher 
they called “the Wagon” and trundled off to a bed and 
room of my own, the reaction set in. I could think 
more clearly. My Dinky-Dunk didn’t love me, or he’d 
never have left me at such a time, no matter what his 
business calls may have been. The Twins weren’t quite 
so humorous as they seemed. There was even some- 
thing disturbingly animal-like in the birth of more 
offspring than one at a time, something almost rey 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


7 


volting in this approach to the littering of one’s 
young. They all tried to unedge that animality by 
treating it as a joke, by confronting it with their con- 
spiracies of jocularity. But it would be no joke to a 
nursing mother in the middle of a winter prairie with 
the nearest doctor twenty long miles away. 

I countermanded my telegram to Dinky-Dunk at 
Vancouver, and cried myself to sleep in a nice relax- 
ing tempest of self-pity which my “special” accepted 
as calmly as a tulip-bed accepts a shower. But lawdy, 
lawdy, how I slept ! And when I woke up and sniffed 
warm air and that painty smell peculiar to new build- 
ings, and heard the radiators sing with steam and the 
windows rattle in the northeast blizzard that was blow- 
ing, I slipped into a truer realization of the intricate 
machinery of protection all about me, and thanked my 
lucky stars that I wasn’t in a lonely prairie shack, as 
I’d been when my almost three-year-old Dinkie was 
born. I remembered, with little tidal waves of con- 
tentment, that my ordeal was a thing of the past, and 
that I was a mother twice over, and rather hungry, 
and rather impatient to get a peek at my God- 
given little babes. 

Then I fell to thinking rather pityingly of my 
forsaken little Dinkie and wondering if Mrs. Teetzel 
would keep his feet dry and cook his cream-of-wheat 
properly, and if Iroquois Annie would have brains 
enough not to overheat the furnace and burn Casa 


8 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


Grande down to the ground. Then I decided to send 
the wire to Dinky -Dunk, after all, for it isn’t every 
day in the year a man can be told he’s the father of 
twins. 

I sent the wire, in the secret hope that it would 
bring my lord and master on the run. But it was eight 
days later, when I was up on a back-rest and having 
my hair braided, that Dinky-Dunk put in an appear- 
ance. And when he did come he chilled me. I can’t 
just say why. He seemed tired and preoccupied and 
unnecessarily self-conscious before the nurses when I 
made him hold Pee-Wee on one arm and Poppsy on the 
other. 

“Now kiss ’em, Daddy,” I commanded. And he had 
to kiss them both on their red and puckered little 
faces. Then he handed them over with all too appar- 
ent relief, and fell into a brown study. 

“What are you worrying over?” I asked him. 

“I’m wondering how in the world you’ll ever man- 
age,” he solemnly acknowledged. I was able to laugh, 
though it took an effort. 

“For every little foot God sends a little shoe,” I told 
him, remembering the aphorism of my old Irish nurse. 
“And the sooner you get me home, Dinky-Dunk, the 
happier I’ll be. For I’m tired of this place and the 
smell of the formalin and ether and I’m nearly wor- 
ried to death about Dinkie. And in all the wide world, 
O Kaikobad, there’s no place like one’s own home!” 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


9 


Dinky-Dunk didn’t answer me, but I thought he 
looked a little wan and limp as he sat down in one of 
the stiff -backed chairs. I inspected him with a calmer 
and clearer eye. 

“Was that sleeper too hot last night?” I asked, re- 
membering what a bad night could do to a big man. 

“I don’t seem to sleep on a train the way I used to,” 
he said, but his eye evaded mine. And I suspected 
something. 

“Dinky-Dunk,” I demanded, “did you have a berth 
last night?” 

He flushed up rather guiltily. He even seemed to 
resent my questioning him. But I insisted on an an- 
swer. 

“No, I sat up,” he finally confessed. 

“Why?” I demanded. 

And still again his eye tried to evade mine. 

“We’re a bit short of ready cash.” He tried to say 
it indifferently, but the effort was a failure. 

“Then why didn’t you tell me that before ?” I asked, 
sitting up and spurning the back-rest. 

“You had worries enough of your own,” proclaimed 
my weary-eyed lord and master. It gave me a squeezy 
feeling about the heart to see him looking so much like 
an unkempt and overworked and altogether neglected 
husband. And there I’d been lying in the lap of lux- 
ury, with quick-footed ladies in uniform to answer my 
bell and fly at my bidding. 


10 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“But I’ve a right, Dunkie, to know your worries, 
and stand my share of ’em,” I promptly told him. 
ifi And that’s why I want to get out of this smelly old 
hole and back to my home again. I may be the mother 
of twins, and only too often reminded that I’m one of 
the Mammalia, but I’m still your cave-mate and life- 
partner, and I don’t think children ought to come be- 
tween a man and wife. I don’t intend to allow my 
children to do anything like that.” 

I said it quite bravely, but there was a little cloud 
of doubt drifting across the sky of my heart. Mar- 
riage is so different from what the romance-fiddlers 
try to make it. Even Dinky-Dunk doesn’t approve of 
my mammalogical allusions. Yet milk, I find, is one 
of the most important issues of motherhood — only it’s 
impolite to mention the fact. What makes me so im- 
patient of life as I see it reflected in fiction is its trick 
of overlooking the important things and over-accentu- 
ating the trifles. It primps and tries to be genteel — 
for Biology doth make cowards of us all. 

I was going to say, very sagely, that life isn’t so 
mysterious after you’ve been the mother of three chil- 
dren. But that wouldn’t be quite right. It’s mysteri- 
ous in an entirely different way. Even love itself is 
different, I concluded, after lying there in bed day 
after day and thinking the thing over. For there are 
so many different ways, I find, of loving a man. You 
are fond of him, at first, for what you consider his 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


11 


perfections, the same as you are fond of a brand-new 
traveling bag. There isn’t a scratch on his polish or 
a flaw in his make-up. Then you live with him for a 
few years. You live with him and find that life is mak- 
ing a few dents in his loveliness of character, that the 
edges are worn away, that there’s a weakness or two 
where you imagined only strength to be, and that in- 
stead of standing a saint and hero all in one, he’s 
merely an unruly and unreliable human being with his 
ups and downs of patience and temper and passion. 
But, bless his battered old soul, you love him none the 
less for all that. You no longer fret about him being 
unco guid, and you comfortably give up trying to 
match his imaginary virtues with your own. You still 
love him, but you love him differently. There’s a touch 
of pity in your respect for him, a mellowing compas- 
sion, a little of the eternal mother mixed up with the 
eternal sweetheart. And if you are wise you will no 
longer demand the impossible of him. Being a woman, 
you will still want to be loved. But being a woman of 
discernment, you will remember that in some way and 
by some means, if you want to be loved, you must re- 
main lovable. 


Thursday the Nineteenth 


I had to stay in that smelly old hole of a hospital 
and in that bald little prairie city fully a week longer 
than I wanted to. I tried to rebel against being bul- 
lied, even though the hand of iron was padded with 
velvet. But the powers that be were too used to han- 
dling perverse and fretful women. They thwarted my 
purpose and broke my will and kept me in bed until 
I began to think I’d take root there. 

But once I and my bairns were back here at Casa 
Grande I could see that they were right. In the first 
place the trip was tiring, too tiring to rehearse in de- 
tail. Then a vague feeling of neglect and desolation 
took possession of me, for I missed the cool-handed 
efficiency of that ever-dependable “special.” I almost 
surrendered to funk, in fact, when both Poppsy and 
Pee-Wee started up a steady duet of crying. I sat 
down and began to sniffle myself, but my sense of 
humor, thank the Lord, came back and saved the day. 
There was something so utterly ridiculous in that 
briny circle, soon augmented and completed by the ad- 
dition of Dinkie, who apparently felt as lonely and 
overlooked as did his spineless and sniffling mother. 

So I had to tighten the girths of my soul. I took 

12 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


13 


a fresh grip on myself and said : “Look here, Tabbie, 
this is never going to do. This is not the way Hora- 
tius held the bridge. This is not the spirit that built 
Rome. So, up, Guards, and at ’em! Excelsior! 
Audaces fortuna juvat /” 

So I mopped my eyes, and readjusted the Twins, 
and did what I could to placate Dinkie, who continues 
to regard his little brother and sister with a somewhat 
hostile eye. One of my most depressing discoveries 
on getting back home, in fact, was to find that Dinkie 
has grown away from me in my absence. At first he 
even resented my approaches, and he still stares at me, 
now and then, across a gulf of perplexity. But the 
ice is melting. He’s beginning to understand, after 
all, that I’m his really truly mother and that he can 
come to me with his troubles. He’s lost a good deal 
of his color, and I’m beginning to suspect that his 
food hasn’t been properly looked after during the 
last few weeks. It’s a patent fact, at any rate, that 
my house hasn’t been properly looked after. Iroquois 
Annie, that sullen-eyed breed servant of ours, will 
never have any medals pinned on her pinny for neat- 
ness. I’d love to ship her, but heaven only knows 
where we’d find any one to take her place. And I 
simply must have help, during the next few months. 

Casa Grande, by the way, looked such a little dot 
on the wilderness, as we drove back to it, that a spear 
of terror pushed its way through my breast as I real- 


14 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


ized that I had mj babies to bring up away out here 
on the edge of this half-settled no-man’s land. If 
only our dreams had come true ! If only the plans of 
mice and men didn’t go so aft agley ! If only the rail- 
way had come through to link us up with civilization, 
and the once promised town had sprung up like a 
mushroom-bed about our still sad and solitary Casa 
Grande ! But what’s the use of repining, Tabbie Mc- 
Ivail? You’ve the second-best house within thirty miles 
of Buckhorn, with glass door-knobs and a laundry- 
chute, and a brood to rear, and a hard-working hus- 
band to cook for. And as the kiddies get older, I im- 
agine, I’ll not be troubled by this terrible feeling of 
loneliness which has been weighing like a plumb-bob 
on my heart for the last few days. I wish Dinky-Dunk 
didn’t have to be so much away from home. 

Old Whinstane Sandy, our hired man, has presented 
me with a hand-made swing-box for Poppsy and Pee- 
Wee, a sort of suspended basket-bed that can be hung 
up in the porch as soon as my two little snoozers are 
able to sleep outdoors. Old Whinnie, by the way, was 
very funny when I showed him the Twins. He sol- 
emnly acknowledged that they were nae sae bad, con- 
seederin’. I suppose he thought it would be treason 
to Dinkie to praise the newcomers who threatened to 
put little Dinkie’ s nose out of joint. And Whinnie, I 
imagine, will always be loyal to Dinkie. He says little 
about it, but I know he loves that child. He loves him 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


15 


in very much the same way that Bobs, our collie dog, 
loves me. It was really Bobs’ welcome, I think, across 
the cold prairie air, that took the tragedy out of my 
homecoming. There were gladness and trust in those 
deep-throated howls of greetings. He even licked the 
snow off my overshoes and nested his head between my 
knees, with his bob-tail thumping the floor like a flick- 
er’s beak. Pie sniffed at the Twins rather disgustedly. 
But he’ll learn to love them, I feel sure, as time goes 
on. Pie’s too intelligent a dog to do otherwise. . . . 

I’ll be glad when spring comes, and takes the razor- 
edge out of this northern air. We’ll have half a month 
of mud first, I suppose. But “there’s never anything 
without something,” as Mrs. Teetzel very sagely an- 
nounced the other day. That sour-apple philosopher, 
by the way, is taking her departure to-morrow. And 
I’m not half so sorry as I pretend to be. She’s made 
me feel like an intruder in my own home. And she’s 
a soured and venomous old ignoramus, for she sneered 
openly at my bath-thermometer and defies Poppsy and 
Pee-Wee to survive the winter without a “comfort.” 
After I’d announced my intention of putting them 
outdoors to sleep, when they were four weeks old, she 
lugubriously acknowledged that there were more ways 
than one of murderin’ infant children. Her ideal along 
this line, I’ve discovered, is slow asphyxiation in a sort 
of Dutch-oven made of an eider-down comforter, with 
as much air as possible shut off from their uncomfort- 


16 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


able little bodies. But the Oracle is going, and I intend 
to bring up my babies in my own way. For I know a 
little more about the game now than I did when little 
Dinkie made his appearance in this vale of tears. And 
whatever my babies may or may not be, they are at 
least healthy little tikes. 


Sunday the Twenty-second 


I seem to be fitting into things again, here at Casa 
Grande. I’ve got my strength back, and an appetite 
like a Cree pony, and the day’s work is no longer a 
terror to me. I’m back in the same old rut, I was go- 
ing to say — but it is not the same. There is a spirit 
of unsettledness about it all which I find impossible to 
define, an air of something impending, of something 
that should be shunned as long as possible. Perhaps 
it’s merely a flare-back from my own shaken nerves. 
Or perhaps it’s because I haven’t been able to get out 
in the open air as much as I used to. I am missing my 
riding. And Paddy, my pinto, will give us a morning 
of it, when we try to get a saddle on his scarred little 
back, for it’s half a year now since he has had a bit 
between his teeth. 

It’s Dinky-Dunk that I’m really worrying over, 
though I don’t know why. I heard him come in very 
quietly last night as I was tucking little Dinkie up in 
his crib. I went to the nursery door, half hoping to 
hear my lord and master sing out his old-time “Hello, 
Lady-Bird!” or “Are you there, Babushka?” But in- 
stead of that he climbed the stairs, rather heavily, and 
passed on down the hall to the little room he calls his 

17 


18 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


study, his sanctum-sanctorum where he keeps his desk 
and papers and books — and the duck-guns, so that 
Dinkie can’t get at them. I could hear him open the 
desk-top and sit down in the squeaky Bank of Eng- 
land chair. 

When I was sure that Dinkie was off, for good, I 
tiptoed out and shut the nursery door. Even big 
houses, I began to realize as I stood there in the hall, 
could have their drawbacks. In the two-by-four shack 
where we’d lived and worked and been happy before 
Casa Grande was built there was no chance for one’s 
husband to shut himself up in his private boudoir and 
barricade himself away from his better-half. So I de- 
cided, all of a sudden, to beard the lion in his den. 
There was such a thing as too much formality in a 
family circle. Yet I felt a bit audacious as I quietly 
pushed open that study door. I even weakened in my 
decision about pouncing on Dinky-Dunk from behind, 
like a leopardess on a helpless stag. Something in his 
pose, in fact, brought me up short. 

Dinky-Dunk was sitting with his head on his hand, 
staring at the wall-paper. And it wasn’t especially in- 
teresting wall-paper. He was sitting there in a trance, 
with a peculiar line of dejection about his forward- 
fallen shoulders. I couldn’t see his face, but I felt sure 
it was not a happy face. 

I even came to a stop, without speaking a word, and 
shrank rather guiltily back through the doorway. It 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


19 


was a relief, in fact, to find that I was able to close the 
door without making a sound. 

When Dinky-Dunk came down-stairs, half an 
hour later, he seemed his same old self. He talked and 
laughed and inquired if Nip and Tuck — those are the 
names he sometimes takes from his team and pins on 
Poppsy and Pee-Wee — had given me a hard day of 
it and explained that Francois — our man on the Har- 
ris Ranch — had sent down a robe of plaited rabbit- 
skin for them. 

I did my best, all the time, to keep my inquisitorial 
eye from fastening itself on Dunkie’s face, for I knew 
that he was playing up to me, that he was acting a 
part which wasn’t coming any too easy. But he stuck 
to his role. When I put down my sewing, because my 
eyes were tired, he even inquired if I hadn’t done 
about enough for one day. 

“I’ve done about half what I ought to do,” I told 
him. “The trouble is, Dinky-Dunk, I’m getting old. 
I’m losing my bounce !” 

That made him laugh a little, though it was rather 
a wistful laugh. 

“Oh, no, Gee-Gee,” he announced, momentarily like 
his old self, “whatever you lose, you’ll never lose that 
undying girlishness of yours!” 

It was not so much what he said, as the mere fact 
that he could say it, which sent a wave of happiness 
through my maternal old body. So I made for him with 


20 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


my Australian crawl-stroke, and kissed him on both 
sides of his stubbly old face, and rumpled him up, and 
went to bed with a touch of silver about the edges of 
the thunder-cloud still hanging away off somewhere on 
the sky-line. 


Wednesday the Twenty-fifth 


There was indeed something wrong. I knew that 
the moment I heard Dinky-Dunk come into the house. 
I knew it by the way he let the storm-door swing shut, 
by the way he crossed the hall as far as the living- 
room door and then turned back, by the way he slowly 
mounted the stairs and passed leaden-footed on to his 
study. And I knew that this time there’d be no “Are 
you there, Little Mother?” or “Where beest thou, 
Boca Chic a?” 

I’d Poppsy and Pee-Wee safe and sound asleep in 
the swing-box that dour old Whinstane Sandy had 
manufactured out of a packing-case, with Francois’ 
robe of plaited rabbit-skin to keep their tootsies warm. 
I’d finished my ironing and bathed little Dinkie and 
buttoned him up in his sleepers and made him hold 
his little hands together while I said his “Now-I-lay- 
me” and tucked him up in his crib with his broken 
mouth-organ and his beloved red-topped shoes under 
the pillow, so that he could find them there first thing 
in the morning and bestow on them his customary 
matutinal kiss of adoration. And I was standing at 
the nursery window, pretty tired in body but foolishly 
21 


22 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


happy and serene in spirit, staring out across the 
leagues of open prairie at the last of the sunset. 

It was one of those wonderful sunsets of the winter- 
end that throw wine-stains back across this bald old 
earth and make you remember that although the green 
hasn’t yet awakened into life there’s release on the 
■way. It was a sunset with an infinite depth to its opal 
and gold and rose and a whisper of spring in its softly 
prolonged afterglow. It made me glad and sad all at 
once, for while there was a hint of vast re-awakenings 
in the riotous wine-glow that merged off into pale 
green to the north, there was also a touch of loneliness 
in the flat and far-flung sky-line. It seemed to recede 
so bewilderingly and so oppressively into a silence and 
into an emptiness which the lonely plume of smoke 
from one lonely shack-chimney both crowned and ac- 
centuated with a wordless touch of poignancy. 

That pennon of shack-smoke, dotting the northern 
horizon, seemed to become something valorous and fine. 
It seemed to me to typify the spirit of man pioneering 
along the fringes of desolation, adventuring into the 
unknown, conquering the untamed realms of his world. 
And it was a good old w r orld, I suddenly felt, a patient 
and bountiful old world with its Browningesque old 
bones set out in the last of the sun — until I heard my 
Dinky-Dunk go lumbering up to his study and quietly 
yet deliberately shut himself in, as I gave one last look 
at Poppsy and Pee-Wee to make sure they were safely 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


23 

covered. Then I stood stock-still in the center of the 
nursery, wondering whether, at such a time, I ought to 
go to my husband or keep away from him. 

I decided, after a minute or two of thought, to 
bide a wee. So I slipped quietly down-stairs and 
stowed Dinkie’s overturned kiddie-car away in the 
cloak-room and warned Iroquois Annie — the meekest- 
looking Redskin ever togged out in the cap and apron 
of domestic servitude — not to burn my fricassee of 
frozen prairie-chicken and not to scorch the scones so 
beloved by my Scotch-Canadian lord and master. 
Then I inspected the supper table and lighted the 
lamp with the Ruskin-green shade and supplanted 
Dinky -Dunk’s napkin that had a coffee-stain along its 
edge with a fresh one from the linen-drawer. Then, 
after airing the house to rid it of the fumes from 
Iroquois Annie’s intemperate griddle and carrying 
Dinkie’s muddied overshoes back to the kitchen and 
lighting the Chinese hall-lamp, I went to the bottom 
of the stairs to call my husband down to supper. 

But still again that wordless feeling of something 
amiss prompted me to hesitate. So instead of calling 
blithely out of him, as I had intended, I went silently 
up the stairs. Then I slipped along the hall and just 
as silently opened his study door. 

My husband was sitting at his desk, confronted by 
a litter of papers and letters, which I knew to be the 
mail he had just brought home and flung there. But 


24 * THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 

he wasn’t looking at anything on his desk. He was 
merely sitting there staring vacantly out of the win- 
dow at the paling light. His elbows were on the arms 
of his Bank of England swivel-chair for which I’d 
made the green baize seat-pad, and as I stared in at 
him, half in shadow, I had an odd impression of his- 
tory repeating itself. This puzzled me, for a moment, 
until I remembered having caught sight of him in 
much the same attitude, only a few days before. But 
this time he looked so tired and drawn and spineless 
that a fish-hook of sudden pity tugged at my throat. 
For my Dinky-Dunk sat there without moving, with 
the hope and the joy of life drawn utterly out of his 
bony big body. The heavy emptiness of his face, as 
rugged as a relief-map in the side-light, even made me 
forget the smell of the scones Iroquois Annie was vin- 
dictively scorching down in the kitchen. He didn’t 
know, of course, that I was watching him, for he 
jumped as I signaled my presence by slamming the 
door after stepping in through it. That jump, I 
knew, wasn’t altogether due to edgy nerves. It was 
also an effort at dissimulation, for his sudden struggle 
to get his scattered lines of manhood together still 
carried a touch of the heroic. But I’d caught a glimpse 
of his soul when it wasn’t on parade. And I knew 
what I knew. He tried to work his poor old harried 
face into a smile as I crossed over to his side. But, 
like Topsy’s kindred, it died a-borning. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


25 


“What’s happened?” I asked, dropping on my 
knees close beside him. 

Instead of answering me, he swung about in the 
swivel-chair so that he more directly faced the win- 
dow. The movement also served to pull away the hand 
which I had almost succeeded in capturing. Nothing, 
I’ve found, can wound a real man more than pity. 

“What’s happened?” I repeated. For I knew, now, 
that something was really and truly and tragically 
w r rong, as plainly as though Dinky-Dunk had up and 
told me so by word of mouth. You can’t live with a 
man for nearly four years without growing into a 
sort of clairvoyant knowledge of those subterranean 
little currents that feed the wells of mood and temper 
and character. He pushed the papers on the desk 
away from him without looking at me. 

“Oh, it’s nothing much,” he said. But he said it 
so listlessly I knew he was merely trying to lie like a 
gentleman. 

“If it’s bad news, I want to know it, right slam- 
bang out,” I told him. And for the first time he 
turned and looked at me, in a meditative and imper- 
sonal sort of way that brought the fish-hook tugging 
at my thorax again. He looked at me as though some 
inner part of him were still debating as to whether or 
not he was about to be confronted by a woman in 
tears. Then a touch of cool desperation crept up into 
his eyes. 


26 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“Our whole apple-cart’s gone over,” he slowly and 
quietly announced, with those coldly narrowed eyes 
still intent on my face, as though very little and yet 
a very great deal depended on just how I w r as going to 
accept that slightly enigmatic remark. And he must 
have noticed the quick frowm of perplexity which 
probably came to my face, for that right hand of his 
resting on the table opened and then closed again, as 
though it w ere squeezing a sponge very dry. “They’ve 
got me,” he said. “They’ve got me — to the last dol- 
lar !” 

I stood up in the uncertain light, for it takes time 
to digest strong words, the same as it takes time to di- 
gest strong meat. 

I remembered how, during the last half-year, 
Dinky-Dunk had been on the wing, hurrying over to 
Calgary, and Edmonton, flying east to Winnipeg, 
scurrying off to the Coast, poring over township maps 
and blue-prints and official-looking letters from land 
associations and banks and loan companies. I had been 
called in to sign papers, w r ith bread-dough on my 
arms, and asked to witness signatures, with Dinkie on 
my hip, and commanded by my absent hearth-mate 
to send on certain documents by the next mail. I had 
also gathered up scattered sheets of paper covered with 
close-penciled rows of figures, and had felt that 
Dinky-Dunk for a year back had been giving more 
time to liis speculations than to his home and his ranch. 



“What’s happened?” I asked 






THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


rt 


I had seen the lines deepen a little on that lean and 
bony face of his and the pepper-and-salt above his 
ears turning into almost pure salt. And I’d missed, this 
many a day, the old boyish note in his laughter and 
the old careless intimacies in his talk. And being a 
woman of almost ordinary intelligence — preoccupied 
as I was with those three precious babies of mine — I 
had arrived at the not unnatural conclusion that my 
spouse was surrendering more and more to that pas- 
sion of his for wealth and power. 

Wealth and power, of course, are big words in the 
language of any man. But I had more than an inkling 
that my husband had been taking a gambler’s chance 
to reach the end in view. And now, in that twilit 
shadow-huddled cubby-hole of a room, it came over me, 
all of a heap, that having taken the gambler’s chance, 
we had met a fate not uncommon to gamblers, and had 
lost. 

“So we’re bust!” I remarked, without any great 
show of emotion, feeling, I suppose, that without 
worldly goods we might consistently be without ele- 
gance. And in the back of my brain I was silently re- 
vising our old Kansas pioneer couplet into 

In land-booms we trusted 
And in land-booms we busted. 

But it wasn’t a joke. You can’t have the bottom 
knocked out of your world, naturally, and find an in- 


£8 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


visible Nero blithely fiddling on your heart-strings. 
And I hated to see Dinky-Dunk sitting there with that 
dead look in his eyes. I hated to see him with his 
spirit broken, with that hollow and haggard misery 
about the jowls, which made me think of a hound- 
dog mourning for a dead master. 

But I knew better than to show any pity for Dinky- 
Dunk at such a time. It would have been effective as 
a stage-picture, I know, my reaching out and pressing 
his tired head against a breast sobbing with compre- 
hension and shaking with compassion. But pity, with 
real men-folks in real life, is perilous stuff to deal in. 
I was equally afraid to feel sorry for myself, even 
though my body chilled with the sudden suspicion that 
Casa Grande and all it held might be taken away from 
me, that my bairns might be turned out of their warm 
and comfortable beds, overnight, that the consoling 
sense of security which those years of labor had 
builded up about us might vanish in a breath. And I 
needed new flannelette for the Twins’ nighties, and a 
reefer for little Dinky-Dunk, and an aluminum 
double-boiler that didn’t leak for me maun’s porritch. 
There were rafts of things I needed, rafts and rafts of 
them. But here we were bust, so far as I could tell, on 
the rocks, swamped, stranded and wrecked. 

I held myself in, however, even if it did take an 
effort. I crossed casually over to the door, and opened 
it to sniff at the smell of supper. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


29 

“Whatever happens, Dinky-Dunk,” I very calmly 
announced, “we’ve got to eat. And if that she-Indian 
scorches another scone I’ll go down there and scalp 
her.” 

My husband got slowly and heavily up out of the 
chair, which gave out a squeak or two even when re- 
lieved of his weight. I knew by his face in the half- 
light that he was going to say that he didn’t care to 
eat. 

But, instead of saying that, he stood looking at me, 
with a tragically humble sort of contriteness. Then, 
without quite knowing he was doing it, he brought his 
hands together in a sort of clinch, with his face twisted 
up in an odd little grimace of revolt, as though he 
stood ashamed to let me see that his lip was quivering. 

“It’s such a rotten deal,” he almost moaned, “to 
you and the kiddies.” 

“Oh, we’ll survive it,” I said with a grin that was 
plainly forced. 

“But you don’t seem to understand what it means,” 
he protested. His impatience, I could see, was simply 
that of a man overtaxed. And I could afford to 
make allowance for it. 

“I understand that it’s almost an hour past supper- 
time, my Lord, and that if you don’t give me a chance 
to stoke up I’ll bite the edges off the lamp-shade !” 

I was rewarded by just the ghost of a smile, a 
smile that was much too wan and sickly to live long. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


30 


“All right,” announced Dinky-Dunk, “I’ll be 
down in a minute or two.” 

There was courage in that, I saw, for all the list- 
lessness of the tone in which it had been uttered. So I 
went skipping down-stairs and closed my baby grand 
and inspected the table and twisted the glass bowl that 
held my nasturtium-buds about, to the end that the 
telltale word of “Salt” embossed on its side would not 
betray the fact that it had been commandeered from 
the kitchen-cabinet. Then I turned up the lamp and 
smilingly waited until my lord and master seated him- 
self at the other side of the table, grateful beyond 
words that we had at least that evening alone and 
were not compelled to act up to a part before the eyes 
of strangers. 

Yet it was anything but a successful meal. Dinky- 
Dunk’s pretense at eating was about as hollow as my 
pretense at light-heartedness. We each knew that the 
other was playing a part, and the time came when to 
keep it up was altogether too much of a mockery. 

“Dinky-Dunk,” I said after a silence that was too 
abysmal to be ignored, “let’s look this thing squarely 
in the face.” 

“I can’t!” 

“Why not?” 

“I haven’t the courage.” 

“Then we’ve got to get it,” I insisted. “I’m ready to 
face the music, if you are. So let’s get right down t& 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


31 


hard-pan. Have they — have they really cleaned you 
out?” 

“To the last dollar,” he replied, without looking up. 

“What did it?” I asked, remaining stubbornly and 
persistently ox-like in my placidity. 

“No one thing did it, Chaddie, except that I tried 
to bite off too much. And for the last two years, of 
course, the boom’s been flattening out. If our Asso- 
ciated Land Corporation hadn’t gone under — ” 

“Then it has gone under?” I interrupted, with a 
catch of the breath, for I knew just how much had 
been staked on that venture. 

Dinky-Dunk nodded his head. “And carried me 
with it,” he grimly announced. “But even that 
wouldn’t have meant a knock-out, if the government 
had only kept its promise and taken over my Van- 
couver Island water-front.” 

That, I remembered, was to have been some sort of 
a shipyard. Then I remembered something else. 

“When the Twins were born,” I reminded Dunkie, 
“you put the ranch here at Casa Grande in my name. 
Does that mean we lose our home?” 

I was able to speak quietly, but I could hear the 
thud of my own heart-beats. 

“That’s for you to decide,” he none too happily ac- 
knowledged. Then he added, with sudden decisiveness : 
“No, they can’t touch anything of yours! Not a 
thing!” 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“But won’t that hold good with the Harris Ranch, 
as well?” I further inquired. “That was actually 
bought in my name. It was deeded to me from the 
first, and always has been in my name.” 

“Of course it’s yours,” he said with a hesitation 
that was slightly puzzling to me. 

“Then how about the cattle and things ?” 

“What cattle?” 

“The cattle we’ve kept on it to escape the wild 
land tax? Aren’t those all legally mine?” 

It sounded rapacious, I suppose, under the circum- 
stances. It must have seemed like looting on a battle- 
field. But I wasn’t thinking entirely about myself, 
even though poor old Dinky-Dunk evidently assumed 
so, from the look of sudden questioning that came into 
his stricken eyes. 

“Yes, they’re yours,” he almost listlessly responded. 

“Then, as I’ve already said, let’s look this thing 
fairly and squarely in the face. We’ve taken a gam- 
bler’s chance on a big thing, and we’ve lost. We’ve 
lost our pile, as they phrase it out here, but if what 
you say is true, we haven’t lost our home, and what is 
still more important, we haven’t lost our pride.” 

My husband looked down at his plate. 

“That’s gone, too,” he slowly admitted. 

“It doesn’t sound like my Dinky-Dunk, a thing like 
that,” I promptly admonished. But I’d spoken before 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


I caught sight of the tragic look in his eyes as he once 
more looked up at me. 

“If those politicians had only kept their word, we’d 
have had our shipyard deal to save us,” he said, more 
to himself than to me. Yet that, I knew, was more an 
excuse than a reason. 

“And if the rabbit-dog hadn’t stopped to scratch, 
he might have caught the hare!” I none too merci- 
fully quoted. My husband’s face hardened as he sat 
staring across the table at me. 

“I’m glad you can take it lightly enough to joke 
over,” he remarked, as he got up from his chair. 
There was a ponderous sort of bitterness in his voice, 
a bitterness that brought me up short. I had to fight 
back the surge of pity which was threatening to 
strangle my voice, pity for a man, once so proud of his 
power, standing stripped and naked in his weakness. 

“Heaven knows I don’t want to joke, Honey-Chile,” 
I told him. “But we’re not the first of these wild-cat- 
ting westerners who’ve come a cropper. And since we 
haven’t robbed a bank, or — ” 

“It’s just a little worse than that,” cut in Dinky- 
Dunk, meeting my astonished gaze with a sort of Job- 
like exultation in his own misery. I promptly asked 
him what he meant. He sat down again, before speak- 
ing. 

“I mean that I’ve lost Allie’s money along with my; 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


34 

own,” he very slowly and distinctly said to me. And 
we sat there, staring at each other, for all the world 
like a couple of penguins on a sub- Arctic shingle. 

Allie, I remembered, was Dinky-Dunk’s English 
cousin, Lady Alicia Elizabeth Newland, who’d made 
the Channel flight in a navy plane and the year before 
had figured in a Devonshire motor-car accident. 
Dinky-Dunk had a picture of her, from The Queen, 
up in his study somewhere, the picture of a very deb- 
onair and slender } r oung woman on an Irish hunter. 
He had a still younger picture of her in a tweed skirt 
and spats and golf-boots, on the brick steps of a Sus- 
sex country-house, with the jaw of a bull-dog resting 
across her knee. It was signed and dated and in a silver 
frame and every time I’d found myself polishing that 
oblong of silver I’d done so with a wifely ruffle of 
temper. 

“How much was it?” I finally asked, still adhering 
to my role of the imperturbable chorus. 

“She sent out over seven thousand pounds. She 
w r anted it invested out here.” 

“Why?” 

“Because of the new English taxes, I suppose. 
She said she wanted a ranch, but she left everything 
to me.” 

“Then it was a trust fund!” 

Dinky-Dunk bowed his head, in assent. 

“It practically amounted to that,” he acknowledged. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


35 


“And it’s gone?” 

“Every penny of it.” 

“But, Dinky-Dunk,” I began. I didn’t need to con- 
tinue, for he seemed able to read my thoughts. 

“I was counting on two full sections for Allie in 
the Simmond’s Valley tract. That land is worth thirty 
dollars an acre, unbroken, at any time. But the bank’s 
swept that into the bag, of course, along with the rest. 
The whole thing was like a stack of nine-pins — when 
one tumbled, it knocked the other over. I thought I 
could manage to save that much for her, out of the 
ruin. But the bank saw the land-boom was petering 
out. They shut off my credit, and foreclosed on the 
city block — and that sent the whole card-house down.” 

I had a great deal of thinking to do, during the 
next minute or two. 

“Then isn’t it up to us to knuckle down, Dinky- 
Dunk, and make good on that Lady Alicia mistake? 
If we get a crop this year we can — ” 

But Dinky-Dunk shook his head. “A thousand ' 
bushels an acre couldn’t get me out of this mess,” he 
maintained. 

“Why not?” 

“Because your Lady Alicia and her English maid 
have already arrived in Montreal,” he quietly an- 
nounced. 

“How do you know that?” 

“She wrote to me from New York. She’s had in- 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


36 

fluenza, and it left her with a wheezy tube and a spot 
on her lungs, as she put it. Her doctor told her to go 
to Egypt, but she says Egypt’s impossible, just now, 
and if she doesn’t like our West she says she’ll amble 
on to Arizona, or try California for the winter.” He 
looked away, and smiled rather wanly. “She’s count- 
ing on the big game shooting we can give her!” 

“Grizzly, and buffalo, and that sort of thing?” 

“I suppose so!” 

“And she’s on her way out here?” 

“She’s on her way out here to inspect a ranch which 
doesn’t exist!” 

I sat for a full minute gaping into Dinky-Ihink’s 
woebegone face. And still again I had considerable 
thinking to do. 

“Then we’ll make it exist,” I finally announced. 
But Dinky-Dunk, staring gloomily off into space, 
wasn’t even interested. They had stunned the spirit out 
of him. He wasn’t himself. They’d put him where 
even a well-turned Scotch scone couldn’t appeal to him. 

“Listen,” I solemnly admonished. “If this Cousin 
Allie of yours is coming out here for a ranch, she’s 
got to be presented with one.” 

“It sounds easy !” he said, not without mockery. 

“And apparently the only way we can see that she’s 
given her money’s worth is to hand Casa Grande over 
to her. Surely if she takes this, bag and baggage, 
she ought to be half-satisfied.” 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


37 


Dinky-Dunk looked up at me as though I were as- 
sailing him with the ravings of a mad-woman. He 
knew how proud I had always been of that prairie 
home of ours. 

“Casa Grande is yours — yours and the kiddies,” 
he reminded me. “You’ve at least got that, and God 
knows you’ll need it now, more than ever. God knows 
I’ve at least kept my hands off that!” 

“But don’t you see it can’t be ours, it can’t be a 
home, when there’s a debt of honor between us and 
every acre of it.” 

“You’re in no way involved in that debt,” cried 
out my lord and master, with a trace of the old bat- 
tling light in his eyes. 

“I’m so involved in it that I’m going to give up 
the glory of a two-story house with hardwood floors 
and a windmill and a laundry chute and a real bath- 
room, before that English cousin of yours can find 
out the difference between a spring-lamb and a jack- 
rabbit!” I resolutely informed him. “And I’m go- 
ing to do it without a whimper. Do you know what 
we’re going to do, O lord and master? We’re going 
to take our kiddies and our chattels and our precious 
selves over to that Harris Ranch, and there we’re 
going to begin over again just as we did nearly four 
years ago!” Dinky-Dunk tried to stop me, but I 
warned him aside. “Don’t think I’m doing anything 
romantic. I’m doing something so practical that the 


38 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


more I think of it the more I see it’s the only thing 
possible.” 

He sat looking at me as though he had forgotten 
what my features were like and was just discovering 
that my nose, after all, hadn’t really been put on 
straight. Then the old battling light grew stronger 
than ever in his eyes. 

“It’s not going to be the only thing possible,” he 
declared. “And I’m not going to make yon pay for 
my mistakes. Not on your life! I could have swung 
the farm lands, all right, even though they did have 
me with my back to the wall, if only the city stuff 
hadn’t gone dead — so dead that to-day you couldn’t 
even give it away. I’m not an embezzler. Allie sent 
me out that money to take a chance with, and by tak- 
ing a double chance I honestly thought I could get 
her double returns. As you say, it was a gambler’s 
chance. But the cards broke against me. The thing 
that hurts is that I’ve probably just about cleaned 
the girl out.” 

“How do you know that?” I asked, wondering why 
I was finding it so hard to sympathize with that de- 
nuded and deluded English cousin. 

“Because I know what’s happened to about all of 
the older families and estates over there,” retorted 
Hinky-Dunk. “The government has pretty well 
picked them clean.” 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


39 


“Could I see your Cousin Allie’s letters?” 

“What good would it do?” asked the dour man 
across the table from me. “The fat’s in the fire, and 
we’ve got to face the consequences.” 

“And that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell 
you, you foolish old calvanistic autocrat! We’ve got 
to face the consequences, and the only way to do it 
is to do it the way I’ve said.” 

Dinky-Dunk’s face softened a little, and he seemed 
almost ready to smile. But he very quickly clouded 
up again, just as my own heart clouded up. For I 
knew, notwithstanding my willingness to deny it, that 
I was once more acting on impulse, very much as I’d 
acted on impulse four long years ago in that residu- 
ary old horse-hansom in Central Park when I agreed 
to marry Duncan Argyll McKail before I was even 
in love with him. But, like most women, I was will- 
ing to let Reason step down off the bridge and have 
Intuition pilot me through the more troubled waters 
of a life-crisis. For I knew that I was doing the 
right thing, even though it seemed absurd, even 
though at first sight it seemed too prodigious a sac- 
rifice, just as I’d done the right thing when in the face 
of tribal reasoning and logic I’d gone kiting off to a 
prairie-ranch and a wickiup with a leaky roof. It 
was a tumble, but it was a tumble into a pansy-bed. 
And I was thinking that luck would surely be with me 


40 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


a second time, though thought skidded, like a tire on 
a wet pavement, every time I tried to foresee what this 
newer change would mean to me and mine, 

“You’re not going to face another three years of 
drudgery and shack-dirt,” declared Dinky-Dunk, fol- 
lowing, oddly enough, my own line of thought. “You 
went through that once, and once was enough. It’s 
not fair. It’s not reasonable. It’s not even thinkable. 
You weren’t made for that sort of thing, and — ” 
“Listen to me,” I broke in, doing my best to speak 
calmly and quietly. “Those three years were really 
the happiest three years of all my life. I love to re- 
member them, for they mean so much more than all 
the others. There were a lot of the frills and fixin’s 
of life that we had to do without. But those three 
years brought us closer together, Dinky-Dunk, than 
we have ever been since we moved into this big house 
and got on bowing terms again with luxury. I don’t 
know whether you’ve given it much thought or not, 
husband o’ mine, but during the last year or two 
there’s been a change taking place in us. You’ve 
been worried and busy and forever on the wing, and 
there have been days when I’ve felt you were almost a 
stranger to me, as though I’d got to be a sort of ac- 
cident in your life. Remember, Honey-Chile, I’m not 
blaming you; I’m only pointing out certain obvious 
truths, now the time for a little honest talk seems to 
have cropped up. You were up to your ears in a fight, 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


41 


in a tremendously big fight, for success and money; 
and you were doing it more for me and Dinkie and 
Poppsy and Pee-Wee than for yourself. You couldn’t 
help remembering that I’d been a city girl and imagin- 
ing that prairie-life was a sort of penance I was un- 
dergoing before passing on to the joys of paradise 
in an apartment-hotel with a mail-chute outside the 
door and the sound of the Elevated outside the win- 
dows. And you were terribly wrong in all that, for 
there have been days and days, Dinky-Dunk, when 
I’ve been homesick for that old slabsided ranch-shack 
and the glory of seeing you come in ruddy and hun- 
gry and happy for the ham and eggs and bread I’d 
cooked with my own hands. It seemed to bring us 
so gloriously close together. It seemed so homy and 
happy-go-lucky and soul-satisfying in its complete- 
ness, and we weren’t forever fretting about bank-bal- 
ances and taxes and over-drafts. I was just a ran- 
cher’s wife then — and I can’t help feeling that all 
along there was something in that simple life we didn’t 
value enough. We were just rubes and hicks and 
clodhoppers and hay-tossers in those days, and we 
weren’t staying awake nights worrying about land- 
speculations and water-fronts and trying to make our- 
selves millionaires when we might have been making 
ourselves more at peace with our own souls. And now 
that our card-house of high finance has gone to smash, 
I realize more than ever that I’ve got to be at pear^ 


42 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


with mj own soul and on speaking terms with my own 
husband. And if this strikes you as an exceptionally 
long-winded sermon, my beloved, it’s merely to make 
plain to you that I haven’t surrendered to any sudden 
wave of emotionalism when I talk about migrating 
over to that Harris Ranch. It’s nothing more than 
good old hard-headed, practical self-preservation, for 
I wouldn’t care to live without you, Dinky-Dunk, any 
more than I imagine you’d care to live without your 
own self-respect.” 

I sat back, after what I suppose was the longest 
speech I ever made in my life, and studied my lord and 
master’s face. It was not an easy map to decipher, for 
man, after all, is a pretty complex animal and even in 
his more elemental moments is played upon by pretty 
complex forces. And if there was humility on that 
lean and rock-ribbed countenance of my soul-mate 
there was also antagonism, and mixed up with the an- 
tagonism was a sprinkling of startled wonder, and 
tangled up with the wonder was a slightly perplexed 
brand of contrition, and interwoven with that again 
was a suggestion of allegiance revived, as though he 
had forgotten that he possessed a wife who had a 
heart and mind of her own, who was even worth stick- 
ing to when the rest of the world was threatening to 
give him the cold shoulder. He felt abstractedly 
down in his coat pocket for his pipe, which is always 
a helpful sign. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


43 


“It’s big and fine of you, Chaddie, to put it that 
way,” he began, rather awkwardly, and with just a 
touch of color coming to his rather gray-looking 
cheek-bones. “But can’t you see that now it’s the 
children we’ve got to think of?” 

“I have thought of them,” I quietly announced. 
As though any mother, on prairie or in metropolis, 
didn’t think of them first and last and in-between- 
whiles ! “And that’s what simplifies the situation. 
I want them to have a fair chance. I’d rather they — ” 

“It’s not quite that criminal,” cut in Dinky-Dunk, 
with almost an angry flush creeping up toward his 
forehead. 

“I’m only taking your own word for that,” I re- 
minded him, deliberately steeling my heart against 
the tides of compassion that were trying to dissolve 
it. “And I’m only taking what is, after all, the eas- 
iest course out of the situation.” 

Dinky-Dunk’s color receded, leaving his face even 
more than ever the color of old cheese, for all the 
tan of wind and sun which customarily tinted it, like 
afterglow on a stubbled hillside. 

“But Lady Alicia herself still has something to say 
about all this,” he reminded me. 

“Lady Alicia had better rope in her ranch when the 
roping is good,” I retorted, chilled a little by her re- 
peated intrusion into the situation. For I had no in- 
tention of speaking of Lady Alicia Newland with, 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


44 

bated breath, just because she had a title. I’d 
scratched dances with a duke or two myself, in my 
time, even though I could already see myself once more 
wielding a kitchen-mop and tamping a pail against a 
hog-trough, over at the Harris Ranch. 

“You’re missing the point,” began Dinky-Dunk. 

“Listen!” I suddenly commanded. A harried roe- 
buck has nothing on a young mother for acuteness of 
hearing. And thin and faint, from above-stairs, I 
caught the sound of a treble wailing which was 
promptly augmented into a duet. 

“Poppsy’s got Pee-Wee awake,” I announced as I 
rose from my chair. It seemed something suddenly 
remote and small, this losing of a fortune, before the 
more imminent problem of getting a pair of crying 
babies safely to sleep. I realized that as I ran up- 
stairs and started the swing-box penduluming back 
and forth. I even found myself much calmer in spirit 
by the time I’d crooned and soothed the Twins elf 
again. And I was smiling a little, I think, as I went 
down to my poor old Dinky-Dunk, for he held out a 
hand and barred my way as I rounded the table to 
resume my seat opposite him. 

“You don’t despise me, do you?” he demanded, hold- 
ing me by the sleeve and studying me with a slightly 
mystified eye. It was an eye as wistful as an old 
hound’s in winter, an eye with a hunger I’d not seen 
there this many a day. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


m 


‘‘Despise you, Acushla?” I echoed, with a catch in 
my throat, as my arms closed about him. And as he 
clung to me, with a forlorn sort of desperation, a soul- 
Chinook seemed to sweep up the cold fogs that had 
gathered and swung between us for so many months. 
I’d worried, in secret, about that fog. I’d tried to tell 
myself that it was the coming of the children that had 
made the difference, since a big strong man, naturally, 
had to take second place to those helpless little mites. 
But my Dinky-Dunk had a place in my heart which 
no snoozerette could fill and no infant could usurp. He 
was my man, my mate, my partner in this tangled 
adventure called life, and so long as I had him they 
could take the house with the laundry-chute and the 
last acre of land. 

“My dear, my dear,” I tried to tell him, “I was 
never hungry for money. The one thing I’ve always 
been hungry for is love. What’d be the good of hav- 
ing a millionaire husband if he looked like a man in 
a hair-shirt on every occasion when you asked for a 
moment of his time? And what’s the good of life if 
you can’t crowd a little affection into it? I was just 
thinking we’re all terribly like children in a May- 
pole dance. We’re so impatient to get our colored 
bands wound neatly about a wooden stick, a wooden 
stick that can never be ours, that we make a mad race 
of what really ought to be a careless and leisurely joy. 
We don’t remember to enjoy the dancing, and we 


46 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


seem to get so mixed in our ends. So carpe diem, 
sa j I. And perhaps you remember that sentence from 
Epictetus you once wrote out on a slip of paper and 
pinned to my bedroom door: ‘Better it is that great 
souls should live in small habitations than that abject 
slaves should burrow in great houses !’ ” 

Hinky-Dunk, as I sat brushing back his top-knot, 
regarded me with a sad and slightly acidulated smile. 

“You’d need all that philosophy, and a good deal 
more, before you’d lived for a month in a place like 
the Harris shack,” he warned me. 

“Not if I knew you loved me, O Kaikobad,” I very 
promptly informed him. 

“But you do know that,” he contended, man-like. 
I was glad to find, though, that a little of the bitter- 
ness had gone out of his eyes. 

“Feather-headed women like me, Diddums, hunger 
to hear that sort of thing, hunger to hear it all the 
time. On that theme they want their husbands to be 
like those little Japanese wind-harps that don’t even 
know how to be silent.” 

“Then why did you say, about a month ago, that 
marriage was like Hogan’s Alley, the deeper one got 
into it the tougher it was?” 

“Why did you go off to Edmonton for three whole 
days without kissing me good-by?” I countered. I 
tried to speak lightly, but it took an effort. For my 
husband’s neglect, on that occasion, had seemed the 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


47 

first intimation that the glory was over and done 
with. It had given me about the same feeling that we 
used to have as flapperettes when the circus-manager 
mounted the tub and began to announce the after- 
concert, all for the price of ten cents, one dime ! 

“I wanted to, Tabbie, but you impressed me as 
looking rather unapproachable that day.” 

“When the honey is scarce, my dear, even bees are 
said to be cross,” I reminded him. “And that’s the 
thing that disturbs me, Dinky-Dunk. It must disturb 
any woman to remember that she’s left her happiness 
in one man’s hand. And it’s more than one’s mere 
happiness, for mixed up with that is one’s sense of 
humor and one’s sense of proportion. They all go, 
when you make me miserable. And the Lord knows, 
my dear, that a woman without a sense of humor is 
worse than a dipper without a handle.” 

Dinky-Dunk sat studying me. 

“I guess it was my own sense of proportion that 
got out of kilter, Gee-Gee,” he finally said. “But 
there’s one thing I want you to remember. If I got 
deeper into this game than I should have, it wasn’t 
for what money meant to me. I’ve never been able to 
forget what I took you away from. I took you away 
from luxury and carted you out here to the end of 
Nowhere and had you leave behind about everything 
that made life decent. And the one thing I’ve always 
wanted to do is make good on that over- draft on your 


48 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


bank-account of happiness. I’ve wanted to give back 
to you the things you sacrificed. I knew I owed you 
that, all along. And when the children came I saw 
that I owed it to you more than ever. I want to give 
Dinky-Hink and Poppsy and Pee-Wee a fair chance 
in life. I want to be able to start them right, just 
as much as you do. And you can’t be dumped back 
into a three-roomed wickiup, with three children to 
bring up, and feel that you’re doing the right thing 
by your family.” 

It wasn’t altogether happy talk, but deep down in 
my heart I was glad we were having it. It seemed to 
clear the air, very much as a good old-fashioned thun- 
der-storm can. It left us stumbling back to the es- 
sentials of existence. It showed us where we stood, 
and what we meant to each other, what we must mean 
to each other. And now that the chance had come, I 
intended to have my say out. 

“The things that make life decent, Dinky-Dunk, 
are the things that we carry packed away in our own 
immortal soul, the homely old things like honesty and 
self-respect and contentment of mind. And if we’ve 
got to cut close to the bone before we can square up 
our ledger of life, let’s start the carving while we have 
the chance. Let’s get our conscience clear and know 
we’re playing the game.” 

I was dreadfully afraid he was going to laugh at 
me, it sounded so much like pulpiteering. But I was 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


49 


in earnest, passionately in earnest, and my lord and 
master seemed to realize it. 

“Have you thought about the kiddies?” he asked 
me, for the second time. 

“I’m always thinking about the kiddies,” I told him, 
a trifle puzzled by the wince which so simple a state- 
ment could bring to his face. His wondering eye, 
staring through the open French doors of the living- 
room, rested on my baby grand. 

“How about that?” he demanded, with a grim head- 
nod toward the piano. 

“That may help to amuse Lady Alicia,” I just as 
grimly retorted. 

He stared about that comfortable home which we 
had builded up out of our toil, stared about at it as 
I’ve seen emigrants stare back at the receding shores 
of the land they loved. Then he sat studying my face. 

“How long is it since you’ve seen the inside of the 
Harris shack?” he suddenly asked me. 

“Last Friday when I took the bacon and oatmeal 
over to Soapy and Francois and Whinstane Sandy,” 
I told him. 

“And what did you think of that shack?” 

“It impressed me as being sadly in need of soap 
and water,” I calmy admitted. “It’s like any other 
shack where two or three men have been batching — 
no better and no worse than the wickiup I came to 
here on my honeymoon.” 


50 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


Dinky-Dunk looked about at me quickly, as though 
in search of some touch of malice in that statement. 
He seemed bewildered, in fact, to find that I was able 
to smile at him. 

“But that, Chaddie, was nearly four long years 
ago,” he reminded me, "with a morose and meditative 
clouding of the brow. And I knew exactly what he 
was thinking about. 

“I’ll know better how to go about it this time,” I 
announced with my stubbornest Doctor Pangless grin. 

“But there are two things you haven’t taken into 
consideration,” Dinky-Dunk reminded me. 

“What are they?” I demanded. 

“One is the matter of ready money.” 

“I’ve that six hundred dollars from my Chilean ni- 
trate shares,” I proudly announced. “And Uncle Carl- 
ton said that if the Company ever gets reorganized 
it ought to be a paying concern.” 

Dinky-Dunk, however, didn’t seem greatly im- 
pressed with either the parade of my secret nest-egg 
or the promise of my solitary plunge into finance. 
“What’s the other?” I asked as he still sat frowning 
over his empty pipe. 

“The other is Lady Alicia herself,” he finally ex- 
plained. 

“What can she do?” 

“She may cause complications.” 

“What kind of complications?” 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


51 


“I can’t tell until I’ve seen her,” was Dinky-Dunk’s 
none too definite reply. 

“Then we needn’t cross that bridge until we come 
to it,” I announced as I sat watching Dinky-Dunk 
pack the bowl of his pipe and strike a match. It 
seemed a trivial enough movement. Yet it was monu- 
mental in its homeliness. It was poignant with a 
power to transport me back to earlier and happier 
days, to the days when one never thought of feather- 
ing the nest of existence with the illusions of old age. 
A vague loneliness ate at my heart, the same as a Tat 
eats at a cellar beam. 

I crossed over to my husband’s side and stood with 
one hand on his shoulder as he sat there smoking. 
I waited for him to reach out for my other hand. But 
the burden of his troubles seemed too heavy to let him 
remember. He smoked morosely on. He sat in a 
sort of self-immuring torpor, staring out over* what 
he still regarded as the wreck of his career. So I 
stooped down and helped myself to a very smoky kiss 
before I went off up-stairs to bed. For the children, 
I knew, would have me awake early enough — and 
nursing mothers needs must sleep! 


Thursday the Second 


I have won my point. Dinky-Dunk has succumbed. 
The migration is under way. The great trek has be- 
gun. In plain English, we’re moving. 

I rather hate to think about it. We seem so like 
the Children of Israel bundled out of a Promised Land, 
or old Adam and Eve turned out of the Garden with 
their little Cains and Abels. “We’re up against it, 
Gee-Gee,” as Dinky-Dunk grimly observed. I could 
see that we were, without his telling me. But I re- 
fused to acknowledge it, even to myself. And it 
wasn’t the first occasion. This time, thank heaven, 
I can at least face it with fortitude, if not with relish. 
I don’t like poverty. And I don’t intend to like it. 
And I’m not such a hypocrite as to make a pretense 
of liking it. But I do intend to show my Dinky-Dunk 
that I’m something more than a household ornament, 
just as I intend to show myself that I can be some- 
thing more than a breeder of children. I have given 
my three “hostages to fortune” — and during the last 
few days when we’ve been living, like the infant Moses, 
in a series of rushes, I have awakened to the fact that 
they are indeed hostages. For the little tikes, no mat- 
ter how you maneuver, still demand a big share of 
your time and energy. But one finally manages, in 
52 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


53 


some way or another. Dinky-Dunk threatens to ex- 
pel me from the Mothers’ Union when I work over 
time, and Poppsy and Pee-Wee unite in letting me 
know when I’ve been foolish enough to pass my fa- 
tigue-point. Yet I’ve been sloughing off some of my 
old-time finicky ideas about child-raising and revert- 
ing to the peasant-type of conduct which I once so 
abhorred in my Finnish Olga. And I can’t say that 
either I or my family seem to have suffered much in 
the process. I feel almost uncannily well and strong 
now, and am a wolf for work. If nothing else hap- 
pened when our apple-cart went over, it at least broke 
the monotony of life. I’m able to wring, in fact, just 
a touch of relish out of all this migrational movement 
and stir, and Casa Grande itself is already beginning 
to remind me of a liner’s stateroom about the time the 
pilot comes aboard and the donkey-engines start to 
clatter up with the trunk-nets. 

For three whole days I simply ached to get at the 
Harris Ranch shack, just to show what I could do 
with it. And 1 realized when Dinky-Dunk and I drove 
over to it in the buckboard, on a rather nippy morn- 
ing when it was a joy to go spanking along the prai- 
rie trail with the cold air etching rosettes on your 
cheek-bones, that it was a foeman well worthy of my 
steel. At a first inspection, indeed, it didn’t look any 
too promising. It didn’t exactly stand up on the prai- 
rie-floor and shout “Welcome” into your ears. There 


54 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


was an overturned windmill and a broken-down stable 
that needed a new roof, and a well that had a pump 
which wouldn’t work without priming. There was an 
untidy-looking corral, and a reel for stringing up 
slaughtered beeves, and an overturned Red River cart 
bleached as white as a buffalo skeleton. As for the 
wickiup itself, it was well-enough built, but lacking 
in windows and quite unfinished as to the interior. 

I told Dink}r-Dunk I wanted two new window- 
frames, beaverboard for inside lining, and two gallons 
of paint. I have also demanded a lean-to, to serve as 
an extra bedroom and nursery, and a brand-new bunk- 
house for the hired “hands” when they happen to 
come along. I have also insisted on a covered veranda 
and sleeping porch on the south side of the shack, and 
fly-screens, and repairs to the chimney to stop the 
range from smoking. And since the cellar, which is 
merely timbered, will have to be both my coal-hole and 
my storage-room, it most assuredly will have to be ce- 
mented. I explained to Dinky-Dunk that I wanted 
eave-troughs on both the shack and the stable, for the 
sake of the soft-water, and proceeded to point out the 
need of a new washing-machine, and a kiddie-coop for 
Poppsy and Pee-Wee as soon as the weather got warm, 
and a fence, hog-tight and horse-high, about my half- 
acre of kitchen garden. 

Dinky-Dunk sat staring at me with a wry though 
slightly woebegone face. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


55 


“Look here, Lady-Bird, all this sort of thing takes 
‘rhino, 5 which means ready money. And where’s it go- 
ing to come from?” 

“I’ll use that six hundred, as long as it lasts,” I 
blithely retorted. “And then we’ll get credit.” 

“But my credit is gone,” Dinky-Dunk dolorously 
acknowledged. 

“Then what’s the matter with mine?” I demanded. 
I hadn’t meant to hurt him, when I said that. But I 
refused to be downed. And I intended to make my 
ranch a success. 

“It’s still quite unimpaired, I suppose,” he said in 
a thirty-below-zero sort of voice. 

“Goose !” I said, with a brotherly pat on his droop- 
ing shoulder. But my lord and master refused to be 
cheered up. 

“It’s going to take more than optimism to carry 
us through this first season,” he explained to me. “And 
the only way that I can see is for me to get out and 
rustle for work.” 

“What kind of work?” I demanded. 

“The kind there’s a famine for, at this very mo- 
ment,” was Dinky-Dunk’s reply. 

“You don’t mean being somebody else’s hired man?” 
I said, aghast. 

“A hired man can get four dollars a day and board,” 
retorted my husbanc|. “And a man and team can get 
nine dollars a day. We can’t keep things going with- 


56 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


out ready money. And there’s only one way, out here, 
of getting it.” 

Dinky-Dunk was able to laugh at the look of dis- 
may that came into my face. I hadn’t stopped to pic- 
ture myself as the wife of a hired “hand.” I hadn’t 
quite realized just what wti’d descended to. I hadn’t 
imagined just how much one needed working capital, 
even out here on the edge of Nowhere. 

“But never that way, Diddums !” I cried out in dis- 
may, as I pictured my husband bunking with a sweaty- 
smelling plowing- gang of Swedes and Finns and ho- 
boing about the prairie with a thrashing outfit of the 
Great Unwashed. He’d get cooties, or rheumatism, 
or a sunstroke, or a knife between his ribs some fine 
night — and then where’d I be? I couldn’t think of it. 
I couldn’t think of Duncan Argyll McKail, the de- 
scendant of Scottish kings and second-cousin to a 
title, hiring out to some old skinflint of a farmer who’d 
have him up at four in the morning and keep him on 
the go until eight at night. 

“Then what other way?” asked Dinky-Dunk. 

“You leave it to me,” I retorted. I made a bluff of 
saying it bravely enough, but I inwardly decided that 
instead of sixteen yards of fresh chintz I’d have to be 
Satisfied with five yards. Poverty, after all, is not a 
picturesque thing. But I didn’t intend to be poor, I 
protested to my troubled soul, as I went at that Harris 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


57 


Ranch wickiup, tooth and nail, while Iroquois Annie 
kept an eye on Dinkie and the Twins. 

These same Twins, I can more than ever see, are go- 
ing to be somewhat of a brake on the wheels of indus- 
try. I have even been feeding on “slops,” of late, to 
the end that Poppsy and Pee-Wee may thrive. And 
already I see sex-differences asserting themselves. Pee- 
Wee is a bit of a stoic, while his sister shows a ten- 
dency to prove a bit of a squealer. But Poppsy is 
much the daintier feeder of the two. I’ll probably have 
to wean them both, however, before many more weeks 
slip by. As soon as we get settled in our new shack 
and I can be sure of a one-cow supply of milk I’ll be- 
gin a bottle-feed once in every twenty-four hours. 
Dinky-Dunk says I ought to take a tip from the In- 
dian mother, who sometimes nurses her babe until he’s 
two and three years old. I asked Ikkie — as Dinkie 
calls Iroquois Annie — about this and Ikkie says the 
teepee squaw has no cow’s milk and has to keep on the 
move, so she feeds him breast-milk until he’s able to 
eat meat. Ikkie informs me that she has seen a pa- 
poose turn away from its mother’s breast to take a 
puff or two at a pipe. From which I assume that the 
noble Red Man learns to smoke quite early in life. 

Ikkie has also been enlightening me on other baby- 
customs of her ancestors, explaining that it was once 
the habit for a mother to name her baby for the first 


58 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


thing seen after its birth. That, I told Dinky-Dunk, 
was probably why there were so many “Running Rab- 
bits,” and “White Pups” and “Black Calfs” over on 
the Reservation. And that started me maun enlarging 
on the names of Indians he’d known, the most elon- 
gated of w'hich, he acknowledged, was probably 
“The - Man - Who - Gets-Up-In-The-Middle-Of-The- 
Night-To-Feed-Oats-To-His-Pony,” wild - the most de- 
scriptive was “Slow-To-Comc-Over-The-Hill,” though 
“Shot-At-Many-Times” was not without value, and 
“Long-Time-No-See-Him,” as the appellative for a 
disconsolate young squaw, carried a slight hint of the 
Indian’s genius for nomenclature. Another thing 
mentioned by Dunkie, which has stuck in my memory, 
was his running across a papoose’s grave in an Indian 
burying-ground at Pincer Creek, when he was survey- 
ing, where the Indian baby had been buried — above- 
ground, of course — in an old Saratoga trunk. That 
served to remind me of Francois’ story about “Old 
Sun,” who preceded “Running Rabbit” — note the 
name — as chief of the Alberta Blackfoot tribe, and al- 
ways carried among his souvenirs of conquest a beauti- 
ful white scalp, with hair of the purest gold, very 
long and fine, but would never reveal how or where he 
got it. Many a night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’ve 
worried about that white scalp, and dramatized the cir- 
cumstances of its gathering. Who was the girl w T ith 
the long and lovely tresses of purest gold? And did 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


59 


she die bravely? And did she meet death honorably 
and decently, or after the manner of certain of the 
Jesuits’ Relations ? . . 

I have had a talk with Whinnie, otherwise Whin- 
stane Sandy, who has been ditching at the far end of 
our half-section. I explained the situation to him 
quite openly, acknowledging that we were on the rocks 
but not yet wrecked, and pointing out that there 
might be a few months before the ghost could walk 
again. And Whinstane Sandy has promised to stick. 
Poor old Whinnie not only promised to stick, but vol- 
unteered that if he could get over to Seattle or ’Frisco 
and raise some money on his Klondike claim our 
troubles would be a thing of the past. For Whinnie, 
who is an old-time miner and stampeder, is, I’m afraid, 
a wee bit gone in the upper story. He dreams he has 
a claim up North where there’s millions and millions in 
gold to be dug out. On his moose-hide watch-guard he 
wears a nugget almost half as big as a praline, a nug^ 
get he found himself in ninety-nine, and he’d part with 
his life, I believe, before he’d part with that bangle of 
shiny yellow metal. In his chest of black-oak, too, 
he keeps a package of greasy and dog-eared docu- 
ments, and some day, he proclaims, those papers will 
bring him into millions of money. 

I asked Dinky-Dunk about the nugget, and he says 
it’s genuine gold, without a doubt. He also says 
there’s one chance in a hundred of Whinnie actually. 


60 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


haying a claim up in the gold country, but doubts if 
the poor old fellow will ever get up to it again. It’s 
about on the same footing, apparently, as Uncle Carl- 
ton’s Chilean nitrate mines. For Whinnie had a foot 
frozen, his third winter on the Yukon, and this, of 
course, has left him lame. It means that he’s not a 
great deal of good when it comes to working the land, 
but he’s a clever carpenter, and a good cement-worker, 
and can chore about milking the cows and looking 
after the stock and repairing the farm implements. 
Many a night, after supper, he tells us about the 
Klondike in the old days, about the stampedes of nine- 
ty-eight and ninety-nine, and the dance-halls and 
hardships and gamblers and claim-j umpers. I have 
always had a weakness for him because of his blind 
and unshakable love for my little Dinkie, for whom he 
whittles out ships and windmills and decoy-ducks. 
But when I explained things to simple-minded old 
Whinnie, and he offered to hand over the last of his 
ready money — the money he was hoarding dollar by 
dollar to get back to his hidden El Dorado — it brought 
a lump up into my throat. 

I couldn’t accept his offer, of course, but I loved 
him for making it. And whatever happens, I’m going 
to see that Whinnie has patches on his panties and no 
holes in his socks as long as he abides beneath our 
humble roof-tree. I intend to make the new bunk- 
house just as homy and comfortable as I can, so that 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


61 


Whinnie, under that new roof, won’t feel that he’s 
been thrust out in the cold. But I must have my own 
house for myself and my babes. Soapy Stennet, by 
the way, has been paid off by Dinky-Dunk and is mov- 
ing on to the Knee-Hill country, where he says he can 
get good wages breaking and seeding. Soapy, of 
course, was a good man on the land, but I never took 
a shine to that hard-eyed Canuck, and we’ll get along, 
in some way or other, without him. For, in the lan- 
gauge of the noble Horatius, “I’ll find a way, or make 
it!” 

On the way back to Casa Grande to-night, after a 
hard day’s work, I asked Hinky-Dunk if we wouldn’t 
need some sort of garage over at the Harris Ranch, 
to house our automobile. He said he’d probably put 
doors on the end of one of the portable granaries and 
use that. When I questioned if a car of that size 
would ever fit into a granary he informed me that we 
couldn’t keep our big car. 

“I can get seventeen hundred dollars for that boat,” 
he explained. “We’ll have to be satisfied with a tin 
Lizzie, and squander less on gasoline.” 

So once again am I reminded that the unpardon- 
able crime of poverty is not always picturesque. But 
I wrestled with my soul then and there, and put my 
pride in my pocket and told Dinky-Dunk I didn’t 
give a rip what kind of a car I rode in so long as I 
had such a handsome chauffeur . And I reached out 


62 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


and patted him on the knee, but he was too deep in his 
worries about business matters, I suppose, to pay any 
attention to that unseemly advance. 

To-night after supper, when the bairns were safely 
in bed, I opened up the baby grand, intent on dying 
game, whatever happened or was to happen. But my 
concert wasn’t much of a success. When you do a 
thing for the last time, and know it’s to be the last 
time, it gives you a graveyardy sort of feeling, no 
matter how you may struggle against it. And the 
blither the tune the heavier it seemed to make my heart. 
So I swung back to the statelier things that have come 
down to us out of the cool and quiet of Time. I eased 
my soul with the Sonata Appassionata and lost my- 
self in the Moonlight and pounded out the Eroica. 
But my fingers were stiff and my touch was wooden — - 
so it was small wonder my poor lord and master 
tried to bury himself in his four-day-old newspaper. 
Then I tried Schubert’s Rosamonde , though that 
wasn’t much of a success. So I wandered on through 
Liszt to Chopin. And even Chopin struck me as too 
soft and sugary and far-away for a homesteader’s 
Htife, so I sang 

“In the dead av the night, acushla, 

When the new big house is still,” — 

to see if it would shake any sign of recognition out 
of my harried old Dinky-Dunk. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


63 


As I beheld nothing more than an abstracted frown 
over the tip-top edge of his paper, I defiantly swung 
into The Humming Coon , which apparently had no 
more effect than Herman Lohr. So with malice afore- 
thought I slowly and deliberately pounded out the 
Beethoven Funeral March. I lost myself, in fact, in 
that glorious and melodic wail of sorrow, merged my 
own puny troubles in its god-like immensities, and w T as 
brought down to earth by a sudden movement from 
Einky-Dunk. 

“Why rub it in?” he almost angrily demanded as 
he got up and left the room. . . . 

But that stammering little soul-flight has done me 
good. It has given me back my perspective. I re- 
fuse to be downed. I’m still the captain of my soul. 
I’m still at the wheel, no matter if we are rolling a bit. 
And life, in some way, is still going to be good, still 
well worth the living ! 


Wednesday the Eighth 

Dinky-Dunk has had word that Lady Alicia is on 
her way west. He seems to regard that event as some- 
thing very solemn, but I refuse to take seriously either 
her ladyship or her arrival. To-night, I’m more wor- 
ried about Dinkie, who got at the floor-shellac with 
which I’d been furbishing up the bathroom at Casa 
Grande. He succeeded in giving his face and hair a 
very generous coat of it — and I’m hoping against 
hope he didn’t get too much of it in his little stomach. 
He seems normal enough, and in fairly good spirits, 
but I had to scrub his face with coal-oil, to get it clean, 
and his poor little baby-skin is burnt rather pink. 

The winter has broken, the frost is coming out of 
the ground and the mud is not adding to our joy in 
life. Our last load over to the Harris shack was fer- 
ried and tooled through a batter. On the top of it 
(the load , and not the batter!) I placed Olie’s old 
banjo, for whatever happens, we mustn’t be entirely 
without music. 

Yesterday Dinky-Dunk got Paddy saddled and 
bridled for me. Paddy bucked and bit and bolted and 
sulked and tried to brush his rider off against the 
corral posts. But Dinky-Dunk fought it out with 
64s 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


65 


him, and winded him, and mastered him, and made him 
meek enough for me to slip up into the saddle. My 
riding muscles, however, have gone flabby, and two or 
three miles, for the first venture, was all I cared to 
stand. But Pm glad to know that Paddy can be 
pressed into service again, whenever the occasion; 
arises. Poor old Bobs, by the way, keeps looking at 
me with a troubled and questioning eye. He seems to 
know that some unsettling and untoward event is on 
the way. When a coyote howled last night, far off 
on the sky-line, Bobs poured out his soul in an an- 
swering solo of misery. This morning, when I was 
pretty busy, he poked his head between my knees. 
I had a dozen things calling me, but I took the time 
to rub his nose and brush back his ears and tell him 
he was the grandest old dog on all God’s green earth. 
And he repaid me with a look of adoration that put 
springs under my heels for the rest of the morning, 
and came and licked Pee-Wee’s bare heels, and later 
Poppsy’s, when I was giving them their bath. 


Friday the Tenth 


Lady Alicia has arrived. So have her trunks, 
eleven in number — count ’em ! — trunks of queer sizes 
and shapes, of pigskin and patent leather and canvas, 
with gigantic buckles and straps, and all gaudilj 
initialed and plastered with foreign labels. Her lady- 
ship had to come, of course, at the very worst time 
of year, when the mud was at its muckiest and the 
prairie was at its worst. The trails were simply 
awful, with the last of the frost coming out of the 
ground and mother earth a foot-deep sponge of en- 
gulfing stickiness. All the world seemed turned to 
mud. I couldn’t go along, of course, when Dinky- 
Dunk started off in the Teetzels’ borrowed spring 
“democrat” to meet his English cousin at the Buck- 
horn station, with Whinstane Sandy and the wagon 
trailing behind for the luggage. 

We expected a lady in somewhat delicate health, 
so X sent along plenty of rugs and a foot-warmer, 
and saw that the house was well heated, and the west 
room bed turned down. Even a hot-water bottle stood 
ready and waiting to be filled. 

But Lady Alicia, when she arrived with Dinky- 

66 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


67 


Dunk just before nightfall, didn’t impress me as 
very much of an invalid. She struck me more as a 
very vital and audacious woman, neither young nor 
old, with an odd quietness of manner to give a saber- 
edge to her audacity. I could hear her laughing, 
musically and not unpleasantly, at the mud-coated 
“democrat,” which on its return looked a good deal 
like a ’dobe hut mounted on four chariot wheels. But 
everything , for that matter, was covered with mud, 
horses and harness and robes and even the blanket 
in which Lady Alicia had wrapped herself. She had 
done this, I could see, to give decent protection to a 
Redfem coat of plucked beaver with immense reveres, 
though there was mud enough on her stout tan shoes, 
so unmistakably English in their common-sense so- 
lidity, and some on her fur turban and even a splash 
or two on her face. That face, by the way, has an 
apple-blossom skin of which I can see she is justly 
proud. And she has tourmaline eyes, with reddish 
hazel specks in an iris of opaque blue, and small white 
teeth and lips with a telltale curve of wilfulness about 
them. She isn’t exactly girlish, but with all her 
worldly wisdom she has a touch of the clinging-ivy 
type which must make her inordinately appealing to 
men. Her voice is soft and full-voweled, with that 
habitual rising inflection characteristic of the Eng- 
lish, and that rather insolent drawl which in her native 
land seems the final flower of unchallenged privilege. 


68 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


Her hands are very white and fastidious looking, and 
most carefully manicured. She is, in fact, wonder- 
ful in many ways, but I haven’t yet decided whether 
I’m going to like her or not. Pier smile strikes me 
as having more glitter than warmth, and although she 
is neither tall nor full-bodied, she seems to have the 
power of making point take the place of weight. Yet, 
oddly enough, there is an occasional air of masculine 
loose-jointedness about her movements, a half-defiant 
sort of slouch and swagger which would probably 
carry much farther in her Old World than in our 
easier-moving New World, where disdain of decorum 
can not be regarded as quite such a novelty. 

It wasn’t until she was within the protecting door 
of Casa Grande that I woke up to the fact of how 
incongruous she stood on a northwest ranch. She 
struck me, then, as distinctly an urban product, as 
one of those lazy and silk-lined and limousiny sort 
of women who could face an upholstery endurance- 
test without any apparent signs of heart-failure, but 
might be apt to fall down on engine-performance. 
Yet I was determined to suspend all judgment, even 
after I could see that she was making no particular 
effort to meet me half-way, though she did acknowl- 
edge that Dinkie, in his best bib and tucker, was a 
“dawling” and even proclaimed that his complexion 
— due, of course, to the floor-shellac and coal-oil — 
reminded her very much of the higher-colored English 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


69 


children. She also dutifully asked about Poppsy and 
Pee-Wee, after announcing that she found the house 
uncomfortably hot, and seemed surprised that Dinky- 
Dunk should descend to the stabling and feeding and 
watering of his own horses. 

She appeared rather constrained and ill-at-ease, in 
fact, until Dink3 r -Dunk had washed up and joined us. 
Yet I saw, when we sat down to our belated supper, 
that the fair Allie had the abundant and honest appe- 
tite of a healthy boy. She also asked if she might 
smoke between courses — which same worried the un- 
happy Dinky-Dunk much more than it did me. My 
risibilities remained untouched until she languidly re- 
marked that any woman who had twins on the prairie 
ought to get a Y. C. 

But she automatically became, I retorted, a K. C. B. 
This seemed to puzzle the cool-eyed Lady Alicia. 

“That means a Knight Commander of the Bath,” 
she said with her English literalness. 

“Exactly,” I agreed. And Dinky-Dunk had to 
come to her rescue and explain the joke, like a court- 
interpreter translating Cree to the circuit judge, so 
that by the time he got through it didn’t seem a joke 
at all and his eyes were flashing me a code-signal not 
to be too hard on a tenderfoot. When, later on, Lady 
Alicia looked about Casa Grande, which we’d toiled 
and moiled and slaved to make like the homestead 
prints in the immigration pamphlets, she languidly 


70 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


acknowledged that it was rather ducky, whatever that 
may mean, and asked Dinky-Dunk if there’ d be any 
deer-shooting this spring. I notice, by the way, that 
she calls him “Dooncan” and sometimes “Cousin 
Doonk,” which strikes me as being over-intimate, see- 
ing he’s really her second cousin. It seems suggestive 
of some hidden joke between them. And Duncan 
addresses her quite openly as “Allie.” 

This same Allie has brought a lady’s maid with her 
whom she addresses, more Anglico , simply by her sur- 
name of “Struthers.” Struthers is a submerged and 
self-obliterating and patient-eyed woman of nearly 
forty, I should say, with a face that would be both 
intelligent and attractive, if it weren’t so subservient. 
But I’ve a floaty sort of feeling that this same maid 
knows a little more than she lets on to know, and I’m 
wondering what western life will do to her. In one 
year’s time, I’ll wager a plugged nickel against an 
English sovereign, she’ll not be sedately and patiently 
dining at second-table and murmuring “Yes, me 
Lady” in that meek and obedient manner. But it 
fairly took my breath, the adroit and expeditious 
manner in which Struthers had that welter of luggage 
linstrapped and unbuckled and warped into place and 
things stowed away, even down to her ladyship’s 
rather ridiculous folding canvas bathtub. In little 
more than two shakes she had a shimmering litter of 
toilet things out on the dresser tops, and even a nickel 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


71 


alcohol-lamp set up for brewing the apparently essen- 
tial cup of tea. It made me wish that I had a 
Struthers or two of my own on the string. And that 
made my thoughts go hurtling back to my old 
Hortense and how we had parted at the Hotel de 
L’Athenee, and to Theobald Gustav and his aunt the 
Baroness, and the old lost life that seemed such years 
and years away. 

But I promptly put the lid down on those over- 
disturbing reminiscences. There should be no post- 
mortems in this family circle, no jeremiads over what 
has gone before. This is the New World and the 
new age where life is too crowded for regrets. I am 
a woman twenty-seven years old, married and the 
mother of three children. I am the wife of a rancher 
who went bust in a land-boom and is compelled to 
start life over again. I must stand beside him, and 
start from the bottom. I must also carry along with 
me all the hopes and prospects of three small lives. 
This, however, is something which I refuse to accept 
as a burden and a handicap. It is a weight attached 
to me, of course, but it’s only the stabilizing weight 
which the tail contributes to the kite, allowing it, in 
the end, to fly higher and keep steadier. It won’t 
seem hard to do without things, when I think of those 
kiddies of mine, and hard work should be a great and 
glorious gift, if it is to give them the start in life 
which they deserve. We’ll no longer quarrel, Diddums 


72 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


and I, about whether Dinkie shall go to Harvard or 
McGill. There’ll be much closer problems than that, 
I imagine, before Dinkie is out of his knickers. Fate 
has shaken us down to realities — and my present per- 
plexity is to get possession of six new milk-pans and 
that new barrel-churn, not to mention the flannelette 
I simply must have for the Twins’ new nighties ! 


Saturday the Eleventh 


These imperturbable English! I didn’t know 
whether I should take off my hat to ’em or despise 
’em. They seem to come out of a different mold to 
what we Americans do. Lady Alicia takes everything 
as a matter of course. She seems to have accepted 
one of the finest ranches west of the Peg as impas- 
sively as an old work-horse accepts a new shoe. Even 
the immensity of our western prairie-land hasn’t quite 
stumped her. She acknowledged that Casa Grande 
was “quaint,” and is obviously much more interested 
in Iroquois Annie, the latter being partly a Redskin, 
than in my humble self. I went up in her estimation 
a little, however, when I coolly accepted one of her 
cigarettes, of which she has brought enough to 
asphyxiate an army. I managed it all right, though 
it was nearly four long years since I’d flicked the ash 
off the end of one — in Chinkie’s yacht going up to 
Monte Carlo. But I was glad enough to drop the 
bigger half of it quietly into my nasturtium window- 
box, when the lady wasn’t looking. 

The lady in question, by the way, seems rather dis- 
appointed to find that Casa Grande has what she 
called “central heating.” About the middle of next 
73 


74 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


February, when the thermometer is flirting with the 
forty-below mark, she may change her mind. I sup- 
pose the lady expected to get a lodge and a deer-park 
along with her new home, to say nothing of a picture 
’all — open to the public on Fridays, admission one 
shilling — and a family ghost, and, of course, a terrace 
for the aforesaid ghost to ambulate along on moon- 
light nights. 

But the thing that’s been troubling me, all day 
long, is: Now that Lady Alicia has got her hand- 
made ranch, what’s she going to do with it? I 
scarcely expect her to take me into her confidence on 
the matter, since she seems intent on regarding me 
as merely a bit of the landscape. The disturbing 
part of it all is that her aloofness is so unstudied, so 
indifferent in its lack of deliberation. It makes me 
feel like a bump on a log. I shouldn’t so much mind 
being activety and martially snubbed, for that would 
give me something definite and tangible to grow 
combative over. But you can’t cross swords with a 
Scotch mist. 

With Dinky-Dunk her ladyship is quite different* 
I never see that look of mild impatience in her 
opaque blue e}^es when he is talking. She flatters him 
openty, in fact, and a man takes to flattery, of course, 
as a kitten takes to cream. Yet with all her out- 
spokenness I am conscious of a tremendous sense of 
reservation. Already, more than once, she has given 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


75 


me a feeling 1 which I’d find it very hard to describe, 
a feeling as though we were being suspended over 
peril by something very fragile. It’s the feeling you 
have when you stand on one of those frail little Alpine 
bridges that can sway so forebodingly with your own 
weight and remind you that nothing but a rustic pal- 
ing or two separates you from the thousand-footed 
abysses below your heels. 

But I mustn’t paint the new mistress of Casa 
Grande all in dark colors. She has her good points, 
and a mind of her own, and a thought or two of her 
own. Dinky-Dunk was asking her about Egypt. 
That county, she retorted, was too dead for her. She 
couldn’t wipe out of her heart the memory of what 
man had suffered along the banks of the Nile, during 
the last four thousand years, what millions of men 
had suffered there because of religion and war and 
caste. 

“I could never be happy in a country of dead races 
and dead creeds and dead cities,” protested Lady 
Alicia, with more emotion than I had expected. “And 
those are the things that always stare me in the face 
out there.” 

This brought the talk around to the New World. 

“I rather fancy that a climate like yours up here,” 
she coolly observed, “would make luxuries of fur- 
niture and dress, and convert what should be the ac- 
cidents of life into essentials. You will always have 


76 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


to fight against nature, you know, and that makes 
man attach more importance to the quest of comfort. 
But when he lives in the tropics, in a surrounding 
that leaves him with few desires, he has time to sit 
down and think about his soul. That’s why you can 
never have a great musician or a great poet in your 
land of blizzards, Cousin Dooncan. You are all kept 
too busy laying up nuts for the winter. You can’t 
afford to turn gipsy and go off star-gazing.” 

“You can if you join the I. W. W.,” I retorted. 
But the allusion was lost on her. 

“I can’t imagine a Shelley or a Theocritus up here 
on your prairie,” she went on, “or a Marcus Aurelius 
in the real-estate business in Winnipeg.” 

Dinky-Dunk was able to smile at this, though I 
wasn’t. 

“But we have the glory of doing things,” I con- 
tended, “and somebody, I believe, has summed up your 
Marcus Aurelius by saying he left behind him a couple 
of beautiful books, an execrable son, and a decaying 
nation. And we don’t intend to decay! We don’t 
live for the moment, it’s true. But we live for To- 
morrow. We write epics in railway lines, and instead 
of working out sonnets we build new cities, and instead 
of sitting down under a palm-tree and twiddling our 
thumbs we turn a wilderness into a new nation, and 
grow grain and give bread to the hungry world where 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


77 


the gipsies don’t seem quite able to make both ends 
meet !” 

I had my say out, and Lady Alicia sat looking at 
me with a sort of mild and impersonal surprise. But 
she declined to argue about it all. And it was just as 
well she didn’t, I suppose, for I had my Irish up and 
didn’t intend to sit back and see my country maligned. 

But on the way home to the Harris Ranch last 
night, with Dinky-Dunk silent and thoughtful, and a 
cold star or two in the high-arching heavens over us, 
I found that my little fire of enthusiasm had burnt 
itself out and those crazy lines of John Davidson kept 
returning to my mind: 

“After the end of all things, 

After the years are spent. 

After the loom is broken. 

After the robe is rent, 

Will there be hearts a-beating, 

Will friend converse with friend, 

Will men and women be lovers, 

After the end?” 

I felt very much alone in the world, and about as 
cheerful as a moonstruck coyote, after those lines 
had rattled in my empty brain like a skeleton in the 
wind. It wasn’t until I saw the light in our wickiup 
window and heard Bobs’ bay of welcome through the 
crystal-clear twilight that the leaden weight of desola- 


78 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


tion slipped off the ledge of my heart. But as I 
heard that deep-noted bark of gladness, that friendly 
intimation of guardianship unrelaxed and untiring, 
I remembered that I had one faithful and unexacting 
friend, even though it was nothing better than a dog. 


Sunday the Twelfth 


Dinky-Dunk rather surprised me to-day by asking 
why I was so stand-offish with his Cousin Allie. I told 
him that I wasn’t in the habit of curling up like a 
kitten on a slab of Polar ice. 

“But she really likes you, Tabbie,” my husband 
protested. “She wants to know you and understand 
you. Only you keep intimidating her, and placing 
her at a disadvantage.” 

This was news to me. Lady Alicia, I’d imagined, 
stood in awe of nothing on the earth beneath nor the 
heavens above. She can speak very sharply, I’ve al- 
ready noticed, to Struthers, when the occasion arises. 
And she’s been very calm and deliberate, as I’ve al- 
ready observed, in her manner of taking over Casa 
Grande. For she hat formally taken it over, Dinky- 
Dunk tells me, and in a day or two we all have to 
trek to town for the signing of the papers. She is, 
apparently, going to run the ranch on her own hook, 
and in her own way. It will be well worth watching. 

I was rather anxious to hear the particulars of the 
transfer to Lady Allie, but Dinky-Dunk seemed a 
little reluctant to go into details, and I didn’t intend to 

79 


80 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


make a parade of my curiosity. I can bide my time. 
. . . Yesterday I put on my old riding-suit, sad- 

dled Paddy, fed the Twins to their last mouthful, and 
went galloping off through the mud to help bring the 
cattle over to the Harris Ranch. I was a sight, in 
that weather-stained old suit and ragged toppers, even 
before I got freckled and splashed with prairie-mud. 
I was standing up in the stirrups laughing at Fran- 
cois, who’d had a bad slip and fallen in a puddle just 
back of our old corral, when her Ladyship came out. 
She must have taken me for a drunken cowboy who’d 
rolled into a sheep-dip, for my nose was red and my 
old Stetson sombrero was crooked on the back of my 
head and even my hair was caked with mud. She 
called to me, rather imperiously, so I went stamped- 
ing up to her, and let Paddy indulge in that theatrical 
stop-slide of his, on his haunches, so that it wasn’t 
until his nose was within two feet of her own that 
she could be quite sure she wasn’t about to be run 
down. 

Her eyes popped a little when she saw it was a 
woman on Paddy, though she’d refused to show a trace 
of fear when we went avalanching down on- her. Then 
she studied my get-up. 

“I should rather like to ride that way,” she coolly 
announced. 

“It’s the only way,” I told her, making Paddy 
pirouette by pressing a heel against his short-ribs. 





f 

lyr'S 


“1 should like to ride that 


way,” 


she 


coolly announced 


V AfcP*VU>. 

IM r > 

Xwy.V'-v,^ * 







THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


81 


She meant, of course, riding astride, which must have 
struck her as the final word in audacity. 

“I like your pony,” next remarked Lady ^Alicia, 
with a somewhat wistful intonation in her voice. 

“He’s a brick,” I acknowledged. Then I swung 
about to help Francois head off a bunch of rampaging 
steers. “Come and see us,” I called back over my 
shoulder. If Lady Alicia answered, I didn’t have time 
to catch what she said. 

But that romp on Paddy has done me good. It 
shook the solemnity out of me. I’ve just decided 
that I’m not going to surrender to this middle-aged 
Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire stuff before my time. I’m go- 
ing to refuse to grow old and poky. I’m going to 
keep the spark alive, the sacred spark of youth, even 
though folks write me down as the biggest loon west 
of the Dirt Hills. So dear Lord — this is my prayer — 
whatever You do to me, keep me alive . O God, don’t 
let me, in Thy divine mercy, be a Dead One. Don’t 
let me be a soured woman with a self-murdered soul. 
Keep the wine of youth in my body and the hope of 
happiness in my heart. Yea, permit me deeply to live 
and love and laugh, so that youth may abide in my 
bones, even as it did in that once-renowned Duchess 
of Lienster, 

Who lived to the age of a hundred and ten, 

To die of a fall from a cherry-tree then ! 


82 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


My poor old Dinky-Dunk, by the way, meanders 
about these days so moody and morose it’s beginning 
to disturb me. He’s at the end of his string, and 
picked clean to the bone, and I’m beginning to see 
that it’s my duty to buoy that man up, to nurse him 
back into a respectable belief in himself. His nerves 
are a bit raw, and he’s not always responsible for his 
manners. The other night he came in tired, and tried 
to read, when Poppsy and Pee-Wee were both going 
it like the Russian Balalaika. To tell the truth, their 
little tummies were a bit upset, because the food pur- 
veyor had had too strenuous a day to be regular in her 
rounds. 

“Can’t you keep those squalling brats quiet?” 
Dinky-Dunk called out to me. It came like a thunder- 
clap. It left me gasping, to think that he could 
call his own flesh and blood “squalling brats.” And 
I was shocked and hurt, but I decided not to show it. 

“Will somebody kindly page Lord Chesterfield?” 
[ quietly remarked as I went to the Twins and wheeled 
"them out to the kitchen, where I gave them hot pep- 
permint and rubbed their backs and quieted them 
down again. 

I suppose there’s no such thing as a perfect hus- 
band. That’s a lesson we’ve all got to learn, the same 
as all children, apparently, have to find out that acorns 
and horse-chestnuts aren’t edible. For the nap wears 
off men the same as it does off clothes. I dread to 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


83 


have to write it down, but I begin to detect thinnesses 
in Dinky-Dunk, and a disturbing little run or two in 
the even web of his character. But he knows when he’s 
played Indian and attempts oblique and rather shame- 
faced efforts to make amends, later on, when it won’t 
be too noticeable. Last night, as I sat sewing, our 
little Dinkie must have had a bad dream, for he wak- 
ened from a sound sleep with a scream of terror. 
Dinky-Dunk went to him first, and took him up and 
sang to him, and when I glanced in I saw a rumply 
and tumbly and sleepy-eyed tot with his kinky head 
against his father’s shoulder. As I took up my sew- 
ing again and heard Dinky-Dunk singing to his son, 
it seemed a proud and happy and contented sort of 
voice. It rose and fell in that next room, in a sort 
of droning bass, and for the life of me I can’t tell why, 
but as I stopped in my sewing and sat listening to that 
father singing to his sleepy-eyed first-born, it brought 
the sudden tears to my eyes. It has been a consider- 
able length of time, cn passant , since I found myself 
sitting down and pumping the brine. I must be get- 
ting hardened in my old age. 


Tuesday the Fourteenth 


Lady Aeeie sent over for Dinky-Dunk yesterday 
morning, to fix the windmill at Casa Grande. They’d 
put it out of commission in the first week, and emptied 
the pressure-tank, and were without water, and were 
as helpless as a couple of canaries. We have a broken 
windmill of our own, right here at home, but Diddums 
went meekly enough, although he was in the midst of 
his morning work — and work is about to loom big over 
this ranch, for we’re at last able to get on the land. 
And the sooner you get on the land, in this latitude, 
the surer you are of your crop. We daren’t shave 
down any margins of chance. We need that 
crop. . . . 

I am really beginning to despair of Iroquois Annie. 
She is the only tiling I can get in the way of hired 
help out here, and yet she is hopeless. She is sullen 
and wasteful, and she has never yet learned to be 
patient with the children. I try to soften and placate 
her with the gift of trinkets, for there is enough Red- 
skin in her to make her inordinately proud of any- 
thing with a bit of flash and glitter to it. But she is 
about as responsive to actu'al kindness as a diamond- 
back rattler would be, and some day, if she drives 
84 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


85 


me too far, I’m going off at half-cock and blow that 
breed into mince-meat. 

By the way, I can see myself writ small in little 
Dinkie, my moods and waywardnesses and wicked im- 
pulses, and sudden chinooks of tenderness alternating 
with a perverse sort of shrinking away from love it- 
self, even when I’m hungering for it. I can also 
catch signs of his pater’s masterfulness cropping out 
in him. Small as he is, he disturbs me by that com- 
bative stare of his. It’s almost a silent challenge I 
see in his eyes as he coolly studies me, after a procla- 
mation that he will be spanked if he repeats a given 
misdeed. 

I’m beginning to understand the meaning of that 
very old phrase about one’s chickens coming home to 
roost. I can even detect sudden impulses of cruelty 
in little Dinkie, when, young and tender as he appears 
to the casual eye, a quick and wilful passion to hurt 
something takes possession of him. Yesterday T 
watched him catch up his one-eyed Teddy Bear, which 
he loves, and beat its head against the shack-floor. 
Sometimes, too, he’ll take possession of a plate and 
fling it to the floor with all his force, even though 
he knows such an act is surely followed by punishment. 
It’s the same with Poppsy and Pee-Wee, with whom 
he is apt to be over-rough, though his offenses in that 
direction may still be touched with just a coloring of 
childish jealousy, long and arduously as I struggle 


86 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


to implant some trace of fraternal feeling m his an- 
archistic little breast. There are even times, after 
he’s been hugging my knees or perhaps stroking my 
cheek with his little velvet hands and murmuring 
“Maaa-maa!” in his small and bird-like coo, when he 
will suddenly turn savage and try to bite my patella 
or pull my ear out by the root. 

Most of this cruelty, I think, is bora of a sheer 
excess of animal spirits. But not all of it. Some of 
it is based on downright wilfulness. I have seen 
him do without things he really wanted, rather than 
unbend and say the necessary “Ta-ta” which stands 
for both “please” and “thanks” in his still limited 
vocabulary. The little Hun will also fall on his pic- 
ture-books, at times, and do his best to tear the linen 
pages apart, flailing them about in the air with gen- 
uine Berserker madness. But along with this, as I’ve 
already said, he has his equally sudden impulses of 
affection, especially when he first wakens in the morn- 
ing and his little body seems to be singing with the 
pure joy of living. He’ll smooth my hair, after I’ve 
lifted him from the crib into my bed, and bury his face 
in the hollow of my neck and kiss my cheek and pat my 
forehead and coo over me until I squeeze him so hard 
he has to grunt. Then he’ll probably do his best to 
pick my eyes out, if I pretend to be asleep, or experi- 
ment with the end of my nose, to see why it doesn’t 
lift up like a door-knocker. Then he’ll snuggle down 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


87 . 


in the crook of my arm, perfectly still except for the 
wriggling of his toes against my hip, and croon there 
with happiness and contentment, like a ring-neck 
dove. 


Friday the Seventeenth 


Lady Aixie couldn’t have been picked quite clean to 
the bone by the McKails, for she’s announced her in- 
tention of buying a touring-car and a gasoline-engine 
and has had a conference with Dinky-Dunk on the 
matter. She also sent to Montreal for the niftiest 
little English sailor suit, for Dinkie, together with a 
sailor hat that has “Agamemnon” printed in gold 
letters on its band. 

I ought to be enthusiastic about it, but I can’t. 
Dinkie himself, however, who calls it his “new nailor 
nuit” — not being yet able to manage the sibilants — 
struts about in it proud as a peacock, and refuses to 
sit down in his supper-chair until Ikkie has carefully 
wiped off the seat of the same, to the end that the be- 
loved nailor nuit might remain immaculate. He’ll lose 
his reverence for it, of course, when he knows it better. 
It’s a habit men have, big or little. 

Lady Allie has confessed that she is succumbing to 
the charm of prairie life. It ought to make her more 
of a woman and less of a silk-lined idler. Dinky- 
Dunk still nurses the illusion that she is delicate, and 
manages to get a lot of glory out of that clinging- 
vine pose of hers, big oak that he is! But it is 
88 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


89 


simply absurd, the way he falls for her flattery.' 
She’s making him believe that he’s a twentieth-century 
St. Augustine and a Saint Christopher all rolled into 
one. Poor old Dinky-Dunk, I’ll have to keep an eye 
on him or they’ll be turning his head, for all its gray 
hairs. He is wax in the hand of designing beauty, 
as are most of the race of man. And the fair Allie, 
I must acknowledge, is dangerously appealing to the 
eye. It’s no wonder poor old Dinky-Dunk nearly 
broke his neck trying to teach her to ride astride. 
But I intend to give her ladyship an inkling, before 
long, that I’m not quite so stupid as I seem to be. 
She mustn’t imagine she can “vamp” my Kaikabad 
with impunity. It’s a case of any port in a storm, I 
suppose, for she has to practise on somebody. But I 
must say she looks well on horseback and can lay 
claim to a poise that always exacts its toll of respect* 
She rides hard, though I imagine she would be un- 
wittingly cruel to her mount. Yet she has been more 
offhanded and friendly, the last two or three times 
she has dropped over to the shack, and she is kind 
to the kiddies, especially Dinkie. She seems genuinely 
and unaffectedly fond of him. As for me, she thinks 
I’m hard, I feel sure, and is secretly studying me — * 
trying to decipher, I suppose, what her sainted cousin 
could ever see in me to kick up a dust about! 

Lady Allie’s London togs, by the way, make me 
feel rather shoddy and slattern. I intend to swing in 




THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


a little stronger for personal adornment, as soon as 
we get things going again. When a woman gives up, 
in that respect, she’s surely a goner. And I may be 
a hard-handed and slabsided prairie huzzy, but there 
was a time when I stood beside the big palms by the 
fountain in the conservatory of Prince Ernest de 
Ligne’s Brussels house in the Rue Montoyer and the 
Marquis of What-Ever-His-Name-Was bowed and set 
all the orders on his chest shaking when he kissed 
my hand and proclaimed that I was the most beautiful 
woman in Belgium ! 

Yes, there was such a time. But it was a long, 
long time ago, and I never thought then I’d be a ran- 
cher’s wife with a barrel-churn to scald out once a 
week and a wheezy old pump to prime in the morning 
and a little hanging garden of Babylon full of babies 
to keep warm and to keep fed and to keep from falling 
on their boneless little cocos ! I might even have 
married Theobald Gustav von Brockdorff and turned 
into an embassy ball lizard and ascended into the old 
family landau of his aunt the baroness, to disport 
along the boulevards therein very much like an oyster 
on the half-shell. I might have done all that, and I 
might not. But it’s all for the best, as the greatest 
pessimist who ever drew the breath of life once tried 
to teach in his Candide . And in my career, as I have 
already written, there shall be no jeremiads. 


'Sunday the Nineteenth 


I’ve been trying to keep tab on the Twins’ weight, 
for it’s important that they should gain according to 
schedule. But I’ve only Dinky-Dunk’s bulky grain- 
scales, and it’s impossible to figure down to anything 
as fine as ounces or even quarter-pounds on such a 
balancer. Yet my babies, I’m afraid, are not gaining 
as they ought. Poppsy is especially fretful of late. 
Why can’t somebody invent children without colic, 
anyway ? I have a feeling that I ought to run on low 
gear for a while. But that’s a luxury I can’t quite 
afford. 

Last night, when I was dead-tired and trying to 
give the last licks to my day’s work without doing a 
Keystone fall over the kitchen table, Dinky-Dunk 
said: “Why haven’t you ever given a name to this 
new place? They tell me you have a genius for nam- 
ing things — and here we are still dubbing our home 
the Harris shack.” 

“I suppose it ought to be an Indian name, in honor 
of Ikkie?” I suggested, doing my best to maintain 
an unruffled front. And Duncan Argyll absently 
agreed that it might just as well. 

“Then what’s the matter with calling it Alabama?” 

91 


92 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


I mordantly suggested. “For as I remember it, that 
means ‘Here we rest.* And I can imagine nothing 
more appropriate.” 

I was half-sorry I said it, for the Lord deliver me 
always from a sarcastic woman. But I’ve a feeling 
that the name is going to stick, whether we want it 
or not. At any rate, Alabama Ranch has rather a 
musical turn to it. . . . 

I wonder if there are any really perfect children 
in the world? Or do the good little boys and girls 
only belong to that sentimentalized mid-Victorian 
fiction which tried so hard to make the world like a 
cross between an old maid’s herb-garden and a Sunday 
afternoon in a London suburb? I have tried talking 
with little Dinkie, and reasoning with him. I have 
striven long and patiently to blow his little spark of 
conscience into the active flame of self- judgment. 
And averse as I am to cruelty and hardness, much as 
I hate the humiliation of physical punishment, my 
poor kiddie and I can’t get along without the slipper. 
I have to spank him, and spank him soundly, about 
once a week. I’m driven to this, or there’d be no sleep 
nor rest nor roof about our heads at Alabama Ranch. 
I don’t give a rip what Barrie may have written about 
the bringing up of children — for he never had any of 
his own ! He never had an imperious young autocrat 
to democratize. He never had a family to de-barba- 
rize, even though he did write very pretty books about 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


93 


the subject. It’s just another case, I suppose, where 
fiction is too cowardly or too finicky to be truthful. 
I had theories about this child-business myself, at one 
time, but my pipe of illusion has plumb gone out. 
It wasn’t so many years ago that I imagined about all 
a mother had to do was to dress in clinging negligees, 
such as you see in the toilet-soap advertisements, and 
hold a spotless little saint on her knee, or have a mirac- 
ulously docile nurse in cap and apron carry in a little 
paragon all done up in dotted Swiss and rose-pink, 
and pose for family groups, not unlike popular prints 
of the royal family in full evening dress, on Louis 
Quinze settees. And later on, of course, one could 
ride out with a row of sedate little princelings at one’s 
side, so that one could murmur, when the world mar- 
veled at their manners, “It’s blood, my dears, merely 
blood !” 

But fled, and fled forever, are all such dreams. 
Dinkie prefers treading on his bread-and-butter before 
consuming it, and does his best to consume the work- 
ings of my sewing-machine, and pokes the spoons 
down through the crack in the kitchen floor, and be- 
trays a weakness for yard-mud and dust in preference 
to the well-scrubbed boards of the sleeping porch, 
which I’ve tried to turn into a sort of nursery by day. 
Most fiction, I find, glides lightly over this eternal 
Waterloo between dirt and water — for no active and 
healthy child is easy to keep clean. That is somethinfif 


94 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


which you never, never, really succeed at. All that 
you can do is to keep up the struggle, consoling 
yourself with the memory that cleanness, even surgical 
cleanness, is only an approximation. The plain every- 
day sort of cleanness promptly resolves itself into a 
sort of neck and neck race with dirt and disorder, a 
neck and neck race with the soap-bar habitually run- 
ning second. Sometimes it seems hopeless. For it’s 
incredible what can happen to an active-bodied boy 
of two or three years in one brief but crowded after- 
noon. It’s equally amazing what can happen to a 
respectably furnished room after a healthy and high- 
spirited young Turk has been turned loose in it for an 
hour or two. 

It’s a battle, all right. But it has its compensa- 
tions. It has to, or the race would wither up like an 
unwatered cucumber-vine. Who doesn’t really love to 
tub a plump and dimpled little body like my Dinkie’s ? 
I’m no petticoated Paul Peel, but I can see enough 
beauty in the curves of that velvety body to lift it up 
and bite it on its promptly protesting little flank. 
And there’s unclouded glory in occasionally togging 
him out in spotless white, and beholding him as im-' 
maculate as a cherub, if only for one brief half-hour. 
It’s the transiency of that spotlessness, I suppose, 
which crowns it with glory. If he was forever in that 
condition, we’d be as indifferent to it as we are to im- 
mortelles and wax flowers. If he was always cherubic 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


95 


and perfect, I suppose, we’d never appreciate that 
perfection or know the joy of triumphing over the 
mother earth that lias an affinity for the finest of us. 

But I do miss a real nursery, in more ways than 
one. The absence of one gives Dinkie the range of the 
whole shack, and when on the range he’s a timber- 
wolf for trouble, and can annoy his father even more 
than he can me by his depredations. Last night after 
supper I heard an icy voice speaking from the end of 
the dining-room where Dinky-Dunk has installed his 
desk. 

“Will you kindly come and see what your son has 
done?” my husband demanded, with a sort of in-this- 
way-madness-lies tone. 

I stepped in through the kitchen door, ignoring 
the quite unconscious humor of “ my son” under the 
circumstances, and found that Dinkie had provided a 
novel flavor for his dad by emptying the bottle of ink 
into his brand-new tin of pipe-tobacco. There was 
nothing to be done, of course, except to wash as much 
of the ink as I could off Dinkie’s face. Nor did I re- 
veal to his father that three days before I had care- 
fully compiled a list of his son and heir’s misdeeds, 
for one round of the clock. They were, I find, as fol- 
lows : 

Overturning a newly opened tin of raspberries $ 
putting bread-dough in his ears; breaking my nail- 
buffer, which, however, I haven’t used for a month 


96 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


and more; paring the bark, with the bread-knife, off 
the lonely little scrub poplar near the kitchen door, our 
one and only shade ; breaking a drinking-glass, which 
was accident ; cutting holes with the scissors in Ikkie’s 
new service-apron; removing the covers from two of 
his father’s engineering books; severing the wire joint 
in my sewing-machine belt (expeditiously and secretly 
mended by Whinnie, however, when he came in with 
the milk-pails ) ; emptying what was left of my bottle 
of vanilla into the bread mixer ; and last but not least, 
trying to swallow and nearly choking on my silver 
thimble, in which he seems to find never-ending dis- 
appointment because it will not remain fixed on the 
point of his nose. 

It may sound like a busy day, but it was, on the 
whole, merely an average one. Yet I’ll wager a 
bushel of number one Northern winter wheat to a 
doughnut ring that if Ibsen had written an epilogue 
for The Doll 9 s House , Nora would have come crawling 
back to her home and her kiddies, in the end. 


TV ednesday the Twenty-second 


Lady Aelie is either dunderheaded or designing- 
She has calmly suggested that her rural phone-line 
be extended from Casa Grande to Alabama Ranch 
so that she can get in touch with Dinky-Dunk when 
she needs his help and guidance. Even as it is, he’s 
called on about five times a week, to run to the help 
of that she-remittance-man in corduroy and dog-skin 
gauntlets and leggings. 

She seems thunderstruck to find that she can’t get 
the hired help she wants, at a moment’s notice. Dinky- 
Dunk says she’s sure to be imposed on, and that al- 
though she’s as green as grass, she’s really anxious to 
learn. He feels that it’s his duty to stand between her 
and the outsiders who’d be only too ready to impose 
on her ignorance. 

She rode over to see the Twins yesterday, who were 
sleeping out under the fly-netting I’d draped over 
them, the pink-tinted kind they put over fruit-baskets 
in the city markets and shops. Poppsy and Pee-Wee 
looked exactly like two peaches, rosy and warm and 
round. 

Lady Allie stared at them with rather an abstracted 
eye, and then, idiot that she is, announced that she’d 
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98 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


like to have twelve. But talk is cheap. The modern 
woman who’s had even half that number has pretty 
well given up her life to her family. It’s remarkable, 
by the way, the silent and fathomless pity I’ve come 
to have for childless women. The thought of a fat 
spinster fussing over a French poodle or a faded 
blond forlornly mothering a Pekinese chow gives me 
ia feeling that is at least first cousin to sea-sickness. 

Lady Allie, I find, has very fixed and definite theo- 
ries as to the rearing of children. They should never 
be rocked or patted, or be given a “comfort,” and they 
should be in bed for the night at sundown. There was 
a time I had a few theories of my own, but I’ve pretty 
well abandoned them. I’ve been taught, in this re- 
spect, to travel light, as the overland voyageurs of this 
country would express it, to travel light and leave the 
final resort to instinct. 


Friday the Twenty-fourth 


I was lazy last night, so both the ink-pot and its 
owner had a rest. Or perhaps it wasn’t so much laziness 
as wilful revolt against the monotony of work, for, 
after all, it’s not the ’unting as ’urts the ’osses, but 
the ’ammer, ’ammer, ’ammer on the ’ard old road! 
I loafed for a long time in a sort of sit-easy torpor, 
with Bobs’ head between my knees while Dinky-Dunk; 
pored over descriptive catalogues about farm-tractors, 
for by hook or by crook we’ve got to have a tractor for 
Alabama Ranch. 

“Bobs,” I said after studying my collie’s eyes for 
a good many minutes, “you are surely one grand old 
dog !” 

Whereupon Bobs wagged his tail-stump with 
sleepy content. As I bent lower and stared closer 
into those humid eyes of his, it seemed as though I 
were staring down into a bottomless well, through a 
peep-hole into Infinity, so deep and wonderful was 
that eye, that dusky pool of love and trust. It was 
like seeing into the velvet-soft recesses of a soul. And 
I could stare into them without fear, just as Bobs 
could stare back without shame. That’s where dogs 
are slightly different from men. If I looked into a 
99 


100 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


man’s eye like that he’d either rudely inquire just what 
the devil I was gaping at or he’d want to ask me out 
to supper in one of those Pompeian places where a 
bald-headed waiter serves lobsters in a chambre partic - 
uliere. 

But all I could see in the eye of my sedate old Bobs 
was love, love infinite and inarticulate, love too big 
ever to be put into words. 

“Dinky-Dunk,” I said, interrupting my lord and 
master at his reading, “if God is really love, as the 
Good Book says, I don’t see why they ever started 
talking about the Lamb of God.” 

“Why shouldn’t they?” asked Diddums, not much 
interested. 

“Because lambs may be artless and innocent little 
things, but when you’ve got their innocence you’ve 
got about everything. They’re not the least bit in- 
telligent, and they’re self-centered and self-immured. 
Now, with dogs it’s different. Dogs love you and 
guard you and ache to serve you.” And I couldn’t 
help stopping to think about the dogs I’d known and 
loved, the dogs who once meant so much in my life: 
Chinkie’s Bingo, with his big baptizing tongue and 
his momentary rainbow as he emerged from the water 
and shook himself with my stick still in his mouth; 
Timmie with his ineradicable hatred for cats; Maxie 
w r ith all his tricks and his singsong of howls when the 
piano played; Schnider, with his mania for my slip- 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


101 


pers and undies, which he carried into most unexpected 
quarters ; and Gyp, God bless him, who was so homely 
of face and form but so true blue in temper and trust. 

“Life, to a dog,” I went on, “really means devo- 
tion to man, doesn’t it?” 

“What are you driving at, anyway ?” asked Dinky- 
Dunk. 

“I was just wondering,” I said as I sat staring 
into Bobs’ eyes, “how strange it would be if, after 
all, God was really a dog, the loving and faithful 
Watch-Dog of His universe !” 

“Please don’t be blasphemous,” Dinky-Dunk coldly 
remarked. 

“But I’m not blasphemous,” I tried to tell him. 
“And I was never more serious in my life. There’s 
even something sacred about it, once you look at it in 
the right way. Just think of the Shepherd-Dog of 
the Stars, the vigilant and affectionate Watcher who 
keeps the wandering worlds in their folds ! That’s not 
one bit worse than the lamb idea, only we’ve got so 
used to the lamb it doesn’t shock us into attention any 
more. Why, just look at these eyes of Bobs right 
now. There’s more nobility and devotion and trust 
and love in them than was ever in all the eyes of all 
the lambs that ever frisked about the fields and sheep- 
folds from Dan to Beersheba !” 

“Your theory, I believe, is entertained by the Igor- 
rotes,” remarked Dinky-Dunk as he made a pretense 


*L02 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


of turning back to his tractor-pamphlet. “The Igor- 
rotes and other barbarians,” he repeated, so as to be 
sure the screw was being turned in the proper direc- 
tion. 

“And now I know why she said the more she knew 
about men the better she liked dogs,” I just as coldly 
remarked, remembering Madame de Stael. “And I 
believe you’re jealous of poor old Bobs just because he 
loves me more than you do.” 

Dinky-Dunk put down his pamphlet. Then he 
called Bobs over to his side of the table. But Bobs, 
I noticed, didn’t go until I’d nodded approval. So 
Dinky-Dunk took his turn at sitting with Bobs’ nose 
in his hand and staring down into the fathomless 
orbs that stared up at him. 

“You’ll never get a lady, me lud, to look up at you 
like that,” I told him. 

“Perhaps they have,” retorted Dinky-Dunk, with 
his face slightly averted. 

“And having done so in the past, there’s the natural 
chance that they’ll do so in the future,” I retorted, 
making it half a question and half a statement. But 
he seemed none too pleased at that thrust, and he 
didn’t even answer me when I told him I supposed I 
was his Airedale, because they say an Airedale is a 
one-man dog. 

“Then don’t at least get distemper,” observed my 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


10b 


Kaikobad, very quietly, over the top of his tractor- 
catalogue. 

I made no sign that I had heard him. But Dinky- 
Dunk would never have spoken to me that way, three 
short years ago. And I imagine he knows it. For, 
after all, a change has been taking place, insubstantial 
and unseen and subterranean, a settling of the founda- 
tions of life which comes not only to a building as it 
grows older but also to the heart as it grows older. 
And I’m worried about the future. 


Monday the — Monday the I-forget-what 


It’s Monday, blue Monday, that’s all I remember, 
except that there’s a rift in the lute of life at Alabama 
Ranch. Yesterday of course was Sunday. And out 
of that day of rest Dinky-Dunk spent just five hours 
over at Casa Grande. When he showed up, rather 
silent and constrained and an hour and a half late for 
dinner, I asked him what had happened. 

He explained that he’d been adjusting the carbu- 
reter on Lady Alicia’s new car. 

“Don’t you think, Duncan,” I said, trying to speak 
calmly, though I was by no means calm inside, “that 
it’s rather a sacrifice of dignity, holding yourself at 
that woman’s beck and call?” 

“We happen to be under a slight debt of obliga- 
tion to that woman my husband retorted, clearly 
more upset than I imagined he could be. 

“But, Dinky-Dunk, you’re not her hired man,” I 
protested, wondering how, without hurting him, I 
could make him see the thing from my standpoint. 

“No, but that’s about what I’m going to become,” 
was his altogether unexpected answer. 

“I can’t say that I quite understand you,” I told 

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THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


105 


him, with a sick feeling which I found it hard to keep 
under. Yet he must have noticed something amus- 
ingly tragic in my attitude, for he laughed, though 
it wasn’t without a touch of bitterness. And laugh- 
ter, under the circumstances, didn’t altogether add to 
my happiness. 

“I simply mean that Allie’s made me an offer of a 
hundred and fifty dollars a month to become her ranch- 
manager,” Dinky-Dunk announced with a casualness 
that was patently forced. “And as I can’t wring 
that much out of this half-section, and as I’d only 
be four-flushing if I let outsiders come in and take 
everything away from a tenderfoot, I don’t see — ” 

“And such a lovely tenderfoot,” I interrupted. 

“ — I don’t see w T hy it isn’t the decent and reason- 
able thing,” concluded my husband, without stoop- 
ing to acknowledge the interruption, “to accept that 
offer.” 

I understood, in a way, every word he was saying; 
yet it seemed several minutes before the real meaning 
of a somewhat startling situation seeped through to 
my brain. 

“Rut surely, if we get a crop,” I began. It was, 
however, a lame beginning. And like most lame be- 
ginnings, it didn’t go far. 

“How are we going to get a crop when we can’t 
even raise money enough to get a tractor?” was Dinky- 
Dunk’s challenge. “When we haven’t help, and we’re 


106 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


short of seed-grain, and we can’t even get a gang- 
plow on credit?” 

It didn’t sound like my Dinky-Dunk of old, for I 
knew that he was equivocating and making excuses, 
that he was engineering our ill luck into an apology 
for worse conduct. But I was afraid of myself, even 
more than I was afraid of Dinky-Dunk. And the 
voice of Instinct kept whispering to me to be patient. 

“Why couldn’t we sell off some of the steers?” I 
valiantly suggested. 

“It’s the wrong season for selling steers,” Dinky- 
Dunk replied with a ponderous sort of patience. “And 
besides, those cattle don’t belong to me.” 

“Then whose are they?” I demanded. 

“They’re yours,” retorted Dinky-Dunk, and I 
found his hair-splitting, at such a time, singularly 
exasperating. 

“I rather imagine they belonged to the family, if 
you intend it to remain a family.” 

He winced at that, as I had proposed that he should. 

“It seems to be getting a dangerously divided one,” 
he flung back, with a quick and hostile glance in my 
direction. 

I was ready to fly to pieces, like a barrel that’s lost 
its hoops. But a thin and quavery and over-disturb- 
ing sound from the swing-box out on the sleeping- 
porch brought me up short. It was a pizzicato note 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


107 


which I promptly recognized as the gentle Pee-Wee’s 
advertisement of wakefulness. So I beat a quick and 
involuntary retreat, knowing only too well what I’d 
have ahead of me if Poppsy joined in to make that 
solo a duet. 

But Pee-Wee refused to be silenced, and what 
Dinky-Dunk had just said felt more and more like a 
branding-iron against my breast. So I carried my 
wailing infant back to the dinner-table where my hus- 
band still stood beside his empty chair. The hostile 
eye with which he regarded the belcantoing Pee-Wee 
reminded me of the time he’d spoken of his own off- 
spring as “squalling brats.” And the memory wasn’t 
a tranquillizing one. It was still another spur rowel- 
ing me back to the ring of combat. 

“Then you’ve decided to take that position?” I 
demanded as I surveyed the cooling roast-beef and the 
fallen Yorkshire pudding. 

“As soon as they can fix up my sieeping-quarters 
in the bunk-house over at Casa Grande,” was Dinky- 
Dunk’s reply. He tried to say it casually, but didn’t 
quite succeed, for I could see his color deepen a little. 
And this, in turn, led to a second only too obvious ges- 
ture of self-defense. 

“My monthly check, of course, will be delivered to 
you,” he announced, with an averted eye. 

“Why to me?” I coldly inquired. 


108 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“It wouldn’t be of much use to me,” he retorted. 
And I resented his basking thus openly in the fires of 
martyrdom. 

“In that case,” I asked, “what satisfaction are you 
getting out of your new position?” 

That sent the color ebbing from his face again, 
and he looked at me as I’d never seen him look at me 
before. We’d both been mauled by the paw of Des- 
tiny, and we were both nursing ragged nerves and 
oversensitized spirits, facing each other as irritable 
as teased rattlers, ready to thump rocks with our head. 
More than once I’d heard Dinky-Dunk proclaim that 
the right sort of people never bickered and quarreled. 
And I remembered Theobald Gustav’s pet aphorism to 
the effect that Hassen machts nicht „. But life had its 
limits. And I wasn’t one of those pink-eared shivery 
little white mice who could be intimidated into tears by 
a frown of disapproval from my imperial mate. And 
married life, after all, is only a sort of guerre d’usure. 

“And you think you’re doing the right thing?” I 
demanded of my husband, not without derision, con- 
fronting him with a challenge on my face and a 
bawling Pee- Wee on my hip. 

Dinky-Dunk sniffed. 

“That child seems to have its mother’s disposition,” 
he murmured, ignoring my question. 

“The prospects of its acquiring anything better 
from its father seem rather remote,” I retorted, strik- 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 109 

4; 

ing blindly. For that over-deft adding of insult to 
injury had awakened every last one of my seven 
sleeping devils. It was an evidence of cruelty, cold 
and calculated cruelty. And by this time little waves 
of liquid fire were running through my tingling body. 

“Then I can’t be of much service to this family,” 
announced Dinky-Dunk, with his maddening note 
of mockery. 

“I fail to see how you can be a retriever for a 
flabby-minded idler and the head of this household at 
one and the same time,” I said out of the seething 
crater-fogs of my indignation. 

“She’s never impressed me as being flabby,” he 
ventured, with a quietness -which only a person who 
knew him would or could recognize as dangerous. 

“Well, I don’t share your admiration for her,” I 
retorted, letting the tide of vitriol carry me along in 
its sweep. 

Dinky-Dunk’s face hardened. 

“Then what do you intend doing about it?” he 
demanded. 

That was a poser, all right. That was a poser 
which, I suppose, many a woman at some time in her 
life has been called on to face. What did I intend 
doing about it? I didn’t care much. But I at least 
intended to save the bruised and broken hulk of my 
pride from utter annihilation. 

“I intend,” I cried out with a quaver in my voice, 


110 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“since you’re not able to fill the bill, to be head of 
this household myself.” 

“That sounds like an ultimatum,” said Dinky- 
Dunk very slowly, his face the sickly color of a meer- 
schaum-pipe bowl. 

“You can take it any way you want to,” I passion- 
ately proclaimed, compelled to raise my voice to the 
end that it might surmount Pee-Wee’s swelling cries. 
“And while you’re being lackey for Lady Alicia New- 
land I’ll run this ranch. I’ll run it in my own way, 
and I’ll run it without hanging on to a woman’s skirt !” 

Dinky-Dunk stared at me as though he were look- 
ing at me through a leper-squint. But he had been 
brutal, was being brutal. And it was a case of fight- 
ing fire with fire. 

“Then you’re welcome to the job,” I heard him 
proclaiming out of his blind white heat of rage. 
“ After that , I’m through !” 

“It won’t be much of a loss,” I shot back at him, 
feeling that he’d soured a bright and sunny life into 
eternal blight. 

“I’ll remember that,” he said with his jaw squared 
and his head down. I saw him push his chair aside 
and wheel about and stride away from the Yorkshire 
pudding with the caved-in roof, and the roast-beef 
that was as cold as my own heart, and the indig- 
nantly protesting Pee-Wee who in some vague way 
kept reminding me that I wasn’t quite as free-handed 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


111 


as I had been so airily imagining myself. For I 
mistily remembered that the Twins, before the day 
was over, were going to find it a very flatulent world. 
But I wasn’t crushed. For there are times when even 
wives and worms will turn. And this was one of them. 


Thursday the Thirtieth 


It’s a busy three days I’ve been having, and if I’m 
a bit tuckered out in body I’m still invincible in spirit. 
For I’ve already triumphed over a tangle or two and 
now I’m going to see this thing through. I’m going 
to see Alabama Ranch make good. 

I teamed in to Buckhorn, with Dinkie and the 
Twins and Ikkie bedded down in the wagon-box on 
fresh wheat-straw, and had a talk with Syd Wood- 
ward, the dealer there. It took me just about ten 
minutes to get down to hard-pan with him, once he 
was convinced that I meant business. He’s going to 
take over my one heavy team, Tumble-Weed and 
Cloud-Maker, though it still gives my heart a wrench 
to think of parting with those faithful animals. I’m 
also going to sell off fifteen or eighteen of the heaviest 
steers and turn back the tin Lizzie, which can be done 
without for a few months at least. 

But, on the other hand, I’m going to have an 8-16 
tractor that’ll turn over an acre of land in little more 
than an hour’s time, and turn it over a trifle better 
than the hired hand’s usual “cut and cover” method, 
and at a cost of less than fifty cents an acre. Later 
on, I can use my tractor for hauling, or turn it to 
practically any other form of farm-power there may 
112 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


113 


be a call for. I’m also getting a special grade of seed- 
wheat. There was a time when I thought that wheat 
was just merely wheat. It rather opened my eyes 
to be told that in one season the Shippers’ Clearance 
Association definitely specified and duly handled 
exactly four hundred and twenty-eight grades of this 
particular grain. Even straight Northern wheat, 
without the taint of weed-seed, may be classified in 
any of the different numbers up to six, and also 
assorted into “tough,” “wet,” “damp,” “musty,” 
“binbumt” and half a dozen other grades and condi- 
tions, according to the season. But since I’m to be a 
wheat-grower, it’s my duty to find out all I can about 
the subject. 

I am also the possessor of three barrels of gaso- 
line, and a new disk-drill, together w r ith the needed 
repairs for the old drill which worked so badly last 
season. I’ve got Whinstane Sandy patching up the 
heavy sets of harness, and at daybreak to-morrow 
I’m going to have him out on the land, and also 
Francois, who has promised to stay with us another 
two weeks. It may be that I’ll put Ikkie in overalls 
and get her out there too, for there’s not a day, not 
an hour, to be lost. I want my crop in. I want my 
seed planted, and the sooner the better. 

Whinstane Sandy, on account of his lame foot, 
can’t follow a plow. But there’s no reason he 
shouldn’t run a tractor. If it wasn’t for my bairns, 


1 u THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 

of course, I’d take that tractor in hand myself. But 
my two little hostages to fortune cut off that chance. 
I’ve decided, however, to have Whinnie build a 
canopy-top over the old buckboard, and fit two strong 
frames, just behind the dashboard, that will hold a 
couple of willow-baskets, end to end. Then I can 
nest Poppsy and Pee-Wee in these two baskets, right 
under my nose, with little Dinkie beside me in the seat, 
and drive from one end of the ranch to the other and 
see that the work is being done, and done right. The 
Rord knows how I’ll get back to the shack in time to 
rustle the grub — but we’ll manage, in some way. 

The Twins have been doing better, the last week or 
two. And I rather dread the idea of weaning them. 
If I had somebody to look after them I could, I sup- 
pose, get a breast-pump and leave their mid-morning 
and mid-afternoon luncheons in cold-storage for them, 
and so ride my tractor without interruption. I remem- 
ber a New York woman who did that, left the drawn 
milk of her breast on ice, so that she might gad and 
shop for a half-day at a time. But the more I think: 
it over the more unnatural and inhuman it seems. 
Yet to hunt for help, in this busy land, is like search- 
ing for a needle in a hay-stack. Already, in the clear 
morning air, one can hear the stutter and skip and 
cough of the tractors along the opalescent sky-line, 
accosting the morning sun with their rattle and tattle 
of harvests to be. And I intend to be in on the game. 


Sunday the Second 


I’m too busy to puddle in spilt milk or worry over 
things that are past. I can’t even take time to 
rhapsodize over the kitchen-cabinet to which Whinnie 
put the finishing touches to-day at noon, though I 
know it will save me many a step. Poor old Whinnie, 
I’m afraid, is more a putterer than a plowman. He’s 
had a good deal of trouble with the tractor, and his 
lame foot seems to bother him, on account of the long 
hours, but he proclaims he’ll see me through. 

Tractor-plowing, I’m beginning to discover, isn’t 
the simple operation it sounds, for your land, in the 
first place, has to be staked off and marked with 
guidons, since you must know your measurements and 
have your headlands uniform and your furrows 
straight or there’ll be a woeful mix-up before you 
come to the end of your job. The great trouble is 
that a tractor can’t turn in its own length, as a team 
of horses can. Hence this deploying space must be 
wasted, or plowed later with horses, and your head- 
lands themselves must be wide enough for the turning 
radius of your tractor. Some of the ranchers out 
here, I understand, even do their tractor-plowing in 
the form of a series of elongated figure-eights, begin- 
115 


116 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


ning at one corner of their tract, claiming this reduces 
the time spent with plows out of the ground. But 
that looked too complex for me to tackle. 

Then, too, machinery has one thing in common with 
man: they occasionally get out of kilter at the very 
time you expect most from them. So this morning 
I had to bend, if I did not actually break, the Sabbath 
by working on my tractor-engine. I put on Ikkie’s 
overalls — for I have succeeded in coercing Ikkie into 
a jumper and the riding-seat of the old gang-plow — 
and went out and studied that tractor. I was deter- 
mined to understand just what was giving the trouble. 

It was two hours before I located the same, which 
was caused by the timer. But I’ve conquered the dog- 
goned thing, and got her to spark right, and I went 
a couple of rounds, Sunday and all, just to make 
sure she was in working order. And neither my 
actions nor my language, I know, are those of a per- 
fect lady. But any one who’d lamped me in that 
get-up, covered with oil and dust and dirt, would 
know that never again could I be a perfect lady. I’m 
a wiper, a greaser, a clodhopper, and, according to 
the sullen and brooding-eyed Ikkie, a bit of a slave- 
driver. And the odd part of it all is that I’m wring- 
ing a perverse sort of enjoyment out of the excite- 
ment and the novelty of the thing. I’m being 
something more than a mere mollusk. I’m making my 
power felt, and producing results. And self-expres- 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


117 


sion, I find, is the breath of life to my soul. But 
I’ve scarcely time to do my hair, and my complexion 
is gone, and I’ve got cracks in my cheek-skin. I’m 
getting old and ugly, and no human being will ever 
again love me. Even my own babies gape at me kind 
of round-eyed when I take them in my arms. 

But I’m wrong there, and I know I’m wrong. My 
little Dinkie will always love me. I know that by the 
way his little brown arms cling about my wind- 
roughened neck, by the way he burrows in against my 
breast and hangs on to me and hollers for his Mummsy 
when she’s out of sight, tie’s not a model youngster, 
I know. I’m afraid I love him too much to demand 
perfection from him. It’s the hard and selfish women, 
after all, who make the ideal mothers — at least from 
the standpoint of the disciplinarian. For the selfish 
woman refuses to be blinded by love, just as she 
refuses to be imposed upon and declines to be troubled 
by the thought of inflicting pain on those perverse 
little toddlers who grow so slowly into the knowledge 
of what is right and wrong. It hurts me like Sam- 
Hill, sometimes, to have to hurt my little man-child. 
When the inevitable and slow-accumulating spanking 
does come, I try to be cool-headed and strictly just 
about it — for one look out of a child’s eyes has the 
trick of bringing you suddenly to the judgment-bar. 
Dinkie, young as he is, can already appraise and 
arraign me and flash back his recognition of injustice. 


118 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


More than once he’s made me think of those lines of 
Frances Lyman’s : 


“Just a look of swift surprise 
From the depths of childish eyes, 
Yet my soul to judgment came, 
Cowering, as before a flame. 

Not a word, a lisp of blame: 

Just a look of swift surprise 
In the quietly lifted eyes !” 


Saturday the Twenty-second 


I’ve got my seed in, glory be ! The deed is done ; 
the mad scramble is over. And Mother Earth, as 
tired as a child of being mauled, lies sleeping in 
the sun. 

If, as some one has said, to plow is to pray, we’ve 
been doing a heap of mouth-worship on Alabama 
Ranch this last few weeks. But the final acre has 
been turned over, the final long sea of furrows disked 
and plank-dragged and seeded down, and after the 
heavy rains of Thursday night there’s just the faint- 
est tinge of green, here and there, along my billiard- 
table of a granary-to-be. 

But the mud is back, and to save my kitchen floor, 
last night, I trimmed down a worn-out broom, cut off 
most of the handle, and fastened it upside down in a 
hole I’d bored at one end of the lower door-step. 

All this talk of mine about wheat sounds as though 
I were what they call out here a Soil Robber, or a 
Land Miner, a get-rich-quick squatter who doesn’t 
bother about mixed farming or the rotation of crops, 
with no true love for the land which he impoverishes 
and leaves behind him when he’s made his pile. I 
want to make my pile, it’s true, but we’ll soon have 


119 


120 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


other things to think about. There’s my home garden 
to be made ready, and the cattle and pigs to be looked 
after, and a run to be built for my chickens. The 
latter, for all their neglect, have been laying like mad 
and I’ve three full crates of eggs in the cellar, all 
dipped in water-glass and ready for barter at Buck- 
horn. If the output keeps up I’ll store away five or 
six crates of the treated eggs for Christmas-season 
sale, for in midwinter they easily bring eighty cents 
a dozen. 

And speaking of barter reminds me that both 
Dinkie and the Twins are growing out of their duds, 
and heaven knows when I’ll find time to make more 
for them. They’ll probably have to promenade around 
like Ikkie’s ancestors. I’ve even run out of safety- 
pins. And since the enduring necessity for the 
safety-pin is evidenced by the fact that it’s even 
found on the baby-mummies of ancient Egypt, and 
must be a good four thousand years old, I’ve had 
Whinnie supply me with some home-made ones, manu- 
factured out of hair-pins. . . . My little Dinkie, 

I notice, is going to love animals. He seems especially 
fond of horses, and is fearless when beside them, or on 
them, or even under them — for he walked calmly in 
under the belly of Jail-Bird, who could have brained 
him with one pound of his wicked big hoof. But the 
beast seemed to know that it was a friend in that 
forbidden quarter, and never so much as moved until 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


121 


Dinkie had been rescued. It won’t be long now before 
Dinkie has a pinto of his own and will go bobbing 
off across the prairie-floor, I suppose, like a monkey 
on a circus-horse. Even now he likes nothing better 
than coming with his mother while she gathers her 
“clutch” of eggs. He can scramble into a manger 
— where my unruly hens persist in making an occa- 
sional nest — like a marmoset. The delight on his 
face at the discovery of even two or three “cackle- 
berries,” as Whinnie calls them, is worth the occasional 
breakage and yolk-stained rompers. For I share in 
that delight myself, since egg-gathering always gives 
me the feeling that I’m partaking of the bounty of 
Nature, that I’m getting something for next-to- 
nothing. It’s the same impulse, really, which drives 
city women to the bargain-counter and the auction- 
room, the sublimated passion to adorn the home teepee- 
pole with the fruits of their cunning! 


Tuesday the Twenty-fifth 

Yesterday I teamed in to Buckhorn, for supplies. 
And as I drove down the main street of that squalid 
little western town I must have looked like something 
the crows had been roosting on. But just as I was 
swinging out of Syd Woodward’s store-yard I caught 
sight of Lady Allie in her big new car, drawn up in 
front of the modestly denominated “New York 
Emporium.” What made me stare, however, was the 
unexpected vision of Duncan Argyll McKail, emerg- 
ing from the aforesaid “Emporium” laden down with 
parcels. These he carried out to the car and was 
dutifully stowing away somewhere down in the back 
seat, when he happened to look up and catch sight of 
me as I swung by in my wagon-box. He turned a 
sort of dull brick-red, and pretended to be having a 
lot of trouble with getting those parcels where they 
ought to be. But he looked exactly like a groom. 
And he knew it. And he knew that I knew he knew 
it. And if he was miserable, which I hope he was, 
I’m pretty sure he wasn’t one-half so miserable as I 
was — and as I am. “ Damn that woman!" I caught 
myself saying, out loud, after staring at my mottled 
old map in my dressing-table mirror. 

122 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


123 


I’ve been watching the sunset to-night, for a long 
time, and thinking about things. It was one of those 
quiet and beautiful prairie sunsets which now and 
then flood you with wonder, in spite of yourself, and 
give you an achey little feeling in the heart. It was 
a riot of orange and Roman gold fading out into pale 
green, with misty opal and pearl-dust along the 
nearer sky-line, then a big star or two, and then 
silence, the silence of utter peace and beauty. But it 
didn’t bring peace to my soul. I could remember 
watching just such a sunset with my lord and master 
beside me, and turning to say : “Don’t you sometimes 
feel, Lover, that you were simply made for joy and 
rapture in moments like this? Don’t you feel as 
though your body were a harp that could throb and 
sing with the happiness of life?” 

And I remembered the way my Dunkie had lifted 
up my chin and kissed me. 

But that seemed a long, long time ago. And I 
wasn’t in tune with the Infinite. And I felt lonely 
and old and neglected, with callouses on my hands 
and the cords showing in my neck, and my nerves not 
exactly what they ought to be. For Sunday, which 
is reckoned as a day of rest, had been a long and busy 
day for me. Dinkie had been obstreperous and had 
eaten most of the paint off his Noah’s Ark, and had 
later burnt his fingers pulling my unbaked loaf-cake 
out of the oven, after eventually tiring of breaking 


124 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


the teeth out of mj comb, one by one. Poppsy and 
Pee-Wee had been peevish and disdainful of each 
other’s society, and Iroquois Annie had gruntingly 
intimated that she was about fed up on trekking the 
floor with wailing infants. But I’d had my week’s 
mending to do, and what was left of the ironing to 
get through and Whinnie’s work-pants to veneer with 
a generous new patch, and thirteen missing buttons 
to restore to the kiddies’ different garments. My 
back ached, my finger-bones were tired, and there was 
a jumpy little nerve in my left temple going for all 
the world like a telegraph-key. And then I gave up. 

I sat down and stared at that neatly folded pile 
of baby-clothes two feet high, a layer-cake of whites 
and faded blues and pinks. I stared at it, and began 
to gulp tragically, wallowing in a wave of self-pity. 
I felt so sorry for myself that I let my flat-iron burn 
a hole clean through the ironing-sheet, without even 
smelling it. That, I told myself, was all that life 
could be to me, just a round of washing and ironing 
and meal-getting and mending, fetch and carry, work 
and worry, from sun-up until sun-down, and many a 
time until midnight. 

And what, I demanded of the frying-pan on its nail 
above the stove-shelf, was I getting out of it ? What 
was it leading to? And what would it eventually 
bring me? It would eventually bring me crabbed and 
crow-footed old age, and fallen arches and a slab- 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


125 


sided figure that a range-pinto would shy at. It 
would bring me empty year after year out here on 
the edge of Nowhere. It would bring me drab and 
spiritless drudgery, and faded eyes, and the heart 
under my ribs slowly but surely growing as dead as 
a door-nail, and the joy of living just as slowly but 
surety going out of my life, the same as the royal 
blue had faded out of Dinkie’s little denim jumpers. 

At that very moment, I remembered, there were 
women listening to symphony music in Carnegie Hall, 
and women sitting in willow-rockers at Long Beach 
contentedly listening to the sea-waves. There were 
women driving through Central Park, soft and lovely 
with early spring, or motoring up to the Clairemont 
for supper and watching the searchlights from the 
war-ships along the Hudson, and listening to the 
music on the roof-gardens and dancing their feet off 
at that green-topped heaven of youth which overlooks 
the Plaza where Sherman’s bronze horse forever 
treads its spray of pine. There were happy-go- 
lucky girls crowding the soda-fountains and regaling 
themselves on fizzy water and fruit sirups, and drop- 
ping in at first nights or motoring out for sea-food 
dinners along lamp-pearled and moonlit boulevards 
of smooth asphalt. And here I was planted half-way 
up to the North Pole, with coyotes for company, with 
a husband who didn’t love me, and not a jar of decent 
face-cream within fifteen miles of the shack! I was 


126 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


lost there in a sea of flat desolation, without compan- 
ionable neighbors, without an idea, without a chance 
for any exchange of thought. I had no time for 
reading, and what was even worse, I had no desire for 
reading, but plodded on, like the stunned ox, kindred 
to the range animals and sister to the cow. 

Then, as I sat luxuriating before my crowded 
banquet-table of misery, as I sat mopping my nose — 
which was getting most unmistakably rough with 
prairie-winds and alkali-water — and thinking what a 
fine mess I’d made of a promising young life, I fancied 
I heard an altogether too familiar C-sharp cry. So I 
got wearily up and went tiptoeing in to see if either 
Poppsy or Pee-Wee were awake. 

But they were there, safe and sound and fast asleep, 
curled up like two plump little kittens, with their long 
lashes on their cheeks of peach-blow pink and their 
dewy little lips slightly parted and four little dimples 
in the back of each of the four little hands. And as 
I stood looking down at them, with a shake still under 
my breastbone, I couldn’t keep from saying: “God 
bless your sleepy old bones !” Something melted and 
fell from the dripping eaves of my heart, and I felt 
that it was a sacred and God-given and joyous life, 
this life of being a mother, and any old maid who 
wants to pirouette around the Plaza roof with a 
lounge-lizard breathing winy breaths into her false 
hair was welcome to her choice. I was at least in the 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


127 


battle of life — and life is a battle which scars you 
more when you try to keep out of it than when you 
wade into it. I was a mother and a home-maker and 
the hope and buttress of the future. And all I wanted 
was a good night’s sleep and some candid friend to 
tell me not to be a feather-headed idiot, but a sensible 
woman with a sensible perspective on things ! 


Friday the Twenty-seventh — Or Should It Be 
the Twenty-eighth 

It has turned quite cold again, with frosts sharp 
enough at night to freeze a half-inch of ice on the 
tub of soft-water I’ve been so carefully saving for 
future shampoos. It’s just as well I didn’t try to 
rush the season by getting too much of my truck- 
garden planted. We’re glad of a good fire in the 
shack-stove after sun-down. I’ve rented thirty acres 
from the Land Association that owns the half-section 
next to mine and am going to get them into oats. If 
they don’t ripen up before the autumn frosts come 
and blight them, I can still use the stuff for green 
feed. And I’ve bargained for the hay-rights from 
the upper end of the section, but heaven only knows 
how I’ll ever get it cut and stacked. 

Whinnie had to kill a calf yesterday, for we’d run 
out of meat. As we’re in a district that’s too sparsely 
settled for a Beef Ring, we have to depend on our- 
selves for our roasts. But whatever happens, I believe 
in feeding my workers. I wonder, by the way, how 
the fair Lady Allie is getting along with her cuisine. 
Is she giving Dinky-Dunk a Beautiful Thought for 
breakfast, instead of a generous plate of ham and 
128 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


129 


eggs? If she is, I imagine she’s going to blight 
Romance in the bud. 

I’ve just had a circular letter from the Women 
Grain Growers’ Association explaining their fight for 
community medical service and a system of itinerant 
rural nurses. They’re organized, and they’re in 
earnest, and I’m with them to the last ditch. They’re 
fighting for the things that this raw new country is 
most in need of. It will take us some time to catch 
up with the East. But the westerner’s a scrambler, 
once he’s started. 

I can’t get away from the fact, since I know them 
both, that there’s a big gulf between the East and 
the West. It shouldn’t be there, of course, but that 
doesn’t seem to affect the issue. It’s the opposition 
of the New to the Old, of the Want-To-Bes to the 
AIways-Has-Beens, of the young and unruly to the 
settled and sedate. We seem to want freedom, and 
they seem to prefer order. We want movement, and 
they want repose. We look more feverishly to the 
future, and they dwell more fondly on the past. They 
call us rough, and w 7 e try to get even by terming 
them effete . They accentuate form, and we remain 
satisfied with performance. We’re jealous of what 
they have and they’re jealous of what we intend to 
be. We’re even secretly envious of certain things 
peculiarly theirs which we openly deride. We’re 
jealous, at heart, of their leisure and their air of per- 


rlSO 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


manence, of their accomplishments and arts and 
books and music, of their buildings and parks and 
towns with the mellowing tone of time over them. And 
as soon as we make money enough, I notice, we slip 
into their neighborhood for a gulp or two at their 
fountains of culture. Some day, naturally, we’ll be 
more alike, and have more in common. The stronger 
colors w r ill fade out of the newer fabric and we’ll 
merge into a more inoffensive monotone of respect- 
ability. Our Navajo-blanket audacities will tone 
down to wall-tapestry sedateness — but not too, too 
soon, I pray the gods ! 

Speaking of Navajo reminds me of Redskins, 
and Redskins take my thoughts straight back to 
Iroquois Annie, who day by day becomes sullener and 
stupider and more impossible. I can see positive 
dislike for my Dinkie in her eyes, and I’m at present 
applying zinc ointment to Pee-Wee’s chafed and 
scalded little body because of her neglect. I’ll ring- 
welt and quarter that breed yet, mark my words ! As 
it is, there’s a constant cloud of worry over my heart 
when I’m away from the shack and my bairns are 
left behind. This same Ikkie, apparently, tried to 
scald poor old Bobs the other day, but Bobs dodged 
most of that steaming potato-water and decided to 
even up the ledger of ill-usage by giving her a well- 
placed nip on the hip. Ikkie now sits down with 
difficulty, and Bobs shows the white of his eye when 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


131 


she comes near him, which isn’t more often than 
Ikkie can help — And of such, in these troublous 
Ides of March, and April and May, is the kingdom 
of Chaddie McKail! 


Tuesday the Second 


I may as well begin at the beginning, I suppose, 
so as to get the whole thing straight. And it started 
with Whinstane Sandy, who broke the wheel off the 
spring-wagon and the third commandment at one and 
the same time. So I harnessed Slip-Along up to the 
buckboard, and put the Twins in their two little 
crow’s-nests and started out to help get my load out 
of that bogged trail, leaving Dinkie behind with Iro- 
quois Annie. 

There was a chill in the air and I was glad of my 
old coonskin coat. It was almost two hours before 
Whinnie and I got the spring-wagon out of its mud- 
bath, and the load on again, and a willow fence-post 
lashed under the drooping axle-end to sustain it on 
its journey back to Alabama Ranch. The sun was 
low, by this time, so I couldn’t wait for Whinnie and 
the team, but drove on ahead with the Twins. 

I was glad to see the smoke going up from my 
lonely little shack-chimney, for I was mud-splashed 
and tired and hungry, and the thought of fire and 
home and supper gave me a comfy feeling just under 
the tip of the left ventricle. I suppose it was the 
long evening shadows and the chill of the air that 
132 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


133 


made the shack look so unutterably lonely as I drove 
up to it. Or perhaps it was because I stared in vain 
for some sign of life. At any rate, I didn’t stop to 
unhitch Slip-Along, but gathered up my Twins and 
made for the door, and nearly stumbled on my nose 
over the broom-end boot-wiper which hadn’t proved 
such a boon as I’d expected. 

I found Iroquois Annie in front of my home-made 
dressing-table mirror, with my last year’s summer 
hat on her head and a look of placid admiration on 
her face. The shack seemed very quiet. It seemed 
so disturbingly quiet that I even forgot about the hat. 

“Where’s Dinkie?” I demanded, as I deposited the 
Twins in their swing-box. 

“He play somew’ere roun’,” announced Ikkie, 
secreting the purloined head-gear and circling away 
from the forbidden dressing-table. 

“But where?” I asked, with exceptional sharpness, 
for my eye had already traversed the most of that 
shack and had encountered no sign of him. 

That sloe-eyed breed didn’t know just where, and 
apparently didn’t care. He was playing somewhere 
outside, with three or four old wooden decoy-ducks. 
That was all she seemed to know. But I didn’t stop 
to question her. I ran to the door and looked out. 
Then my heart began going down like an elevator, 
for I could see nothing of the child. So I made the 
rounds of the shack again, calling “Dinkie !” as I went. 


134 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


Then I looked through the bunk-house, and even 
tried the cellar. Then I went to the rainwater tub, 
with my heart up in my throat. He wasn’t there, of 
course. So I made a flying circle of the out-buildings. 
But still I got no trace of him. 

I was panting when I got back to the shack, where 
Iroquois Annie, was fussing stolidly over the stove- 
fire. I caught her by the snake-like braid of her hair, 
though I didn’t know I was doing it, at the moment, 
and swung her about so that my face confronted hers. 

“Where’s my boy?” I demanded in a sort of shout 
of mingled terror and rage and dread. “Where is he, 
you empty-eyed idiot? Where is he?” 

But that half-breed, of course, couldn’t tell me. 
And a wave of sick fear swept over me. My Dinkie 
was not there. He was nowhere to be found. He was 
lost — lost on the prairie. And I was shouting all 
this at Ikkie, without being quite conscious of what 
I was doing. 

“And remember,” I hissed out at her, in a voice 
that didn’t sound like my own as I swung her about 
by her suddenly parting waist, “if anything has 
happened to that child, Vll hill you! Do you under- 
stand, I’ll kill you as surely as you’re standing 
in those shoes!” 

I went over the shack, room by room, for still the 
third time. Then I went over the bunk-house and 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


135 


the other buildings, and every corner of the truck- 
garden, calling as I went. 

But still there was no answer to my calls. And I 
had to face the steel-cold knowledge that my child 
was lost. That little toddler, scarcely more than a 
baby, had wandered away on the open prairie. 

For one moment of warming relief I thought of 
Bobs. I remembered what a dog is sometimes able 
to do in such predicaments. But I also remembered 
that Bobs was still out on the trail with Whinnie. 
So I circled off on the undulating floor of the prairie, 
calling “Dinkie” every minute or two and staring into 
the distance until my eyes ached, hoping to see some 
moving dot in the midst of all that silence and stillness. 

“My boy is lost,” I kept saying to myself, in 
sobbing little whimpers, with my heart getting more 
and more like a ball of lead. And there could only 
be an hour or two of daylight left. If he wasn’t 
found before night came on — I shut the thought out 
of my heart, and started back for the shack, in a 
white heat of desperation. 

“If you want to live,” I said to the now craven and 
shrinking Ikkie, “you get in that buckboard and make 
for Casa Grande. Drive there as fast as you can. 
Tell my husband that our boy, that my boy, is lost 
on the prairie. Tell him to get help, and come, come 
quick. And stop at the Teetzel ranch on your way. 


136 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


Tell them to send men on horses, and lanterns ! But 
move, woman, move!” 

Ikkie went, with Slip-Along making the buckboard 
skid on the uneven trail as though he were playing 
a game of crack-the-whip with that frightened Indian. 
And I just as promptly took up my search again, 
forgetting about the Twins, forgetting about being 
tired, forgetting everything. 

Half-way between the fenced-in hay-stacks and the 
corral-gate I found a battered decoy-duck with a 
string tied to its neck. It was one of a set that 
Francois and Whinstane Sandy had whittled out over 
a year ago. It was at least a clue. Dinkie must 
have dropped it there. 

It sent me scuttling back among the hay-stacks, 
going over the ground there, foot by foot and calling 
as I went, until my voice had an eerie sound in the 
cold air that took on more and more of a razor-edge 
as the sun and the last of its warmth went over the 
rim of the world. It seemed an empty world, a plain 
of ugly desolation, unfriendly and pitiless in its vast- 
ness. Even the soft green of the wheatlands took 
on a look like verdigris, as though it were something 
malignant and poisonous. And farther out there were 
muskegs, and beyond the three-wire fence, which 
would stand no bar to a wandering child, there were 
range-cattle, half-wild cattle that resented the 
approach of anything but a man on horseback. And 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


137 


somewhere in those darkening regions of peril my 
Dinky-Dink was lost. 

I took up the search again, with the barometer of 
hope falling lower and lower. But I told myself that 
I must be systematic, that I must not keep covering 
the same ground, that I must make the most of what 
was left of the daylight. So I blocked out imaginary 
squares and kept running and calling until I was out 
of breath, then resting with my hand against my 
heart, and running on again. But I could find no 
trace of him. 

He was such a little tot, I kept telling myself. He 
was not warmly dressed, and night was coming on. 
It would be a cold night, with several degrees of frost. 
He would be alone, on that wide and empty prairie, 
with terror in his heart, chilled to the bone, wailing 
for his mother, wailing until he was able to wail no 
more. Already the light was going, I realized with 
mounting waves of desperation, and no child, dressed 
as Dinkie was dressed, could live through the night. 
Even the coyotes would realize his helplessness and 
come and pick his bones clean. 

I kept thinking of Bobs, more than of anything 
else, and wondering why Whinnie was so slow in get- 
ting back with his broken wagon, and worrying over 
when the men would come. I told myself to be calm, 
to be brave, and the next moment was busy picturing 
a little dead body with a tear-washed face. But I 


138 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


went on, calling as I went. Then suddenly I thought 
of praying. 

“O God, it wouldn’t be fair, to take that little mite 
away from me,” I kept saying aloud. “0 God, be 
good to me in this, be merciful, and lead me to him ! 
Bring him back before it is too late ! Bring him back, 
and do with me what You wish, but have pity on that 
poor little toddler! What You want of me, I will do, 
but don’t, 0 God, don’t take my boy away from me !” 

I made promises to God, foolish, desperate, infan- 
tile promises; trying to placate Him in His might 
with my resolutions for better things, trying to strike 
bargains, at the last moment, with the Master of Life 
and Death — even protesting that I’d forgive Dinky- 
Dunk for anything and everything he might have 
done, and that it was the Evil One speaking through 
my lips when I said I’d surely kill Iroquois Annie. 

Then I heard the signal-shots of a gun, and turned 
back toward the shack, which looked small and squat 
on the floor of the paling prairie. I couldn’t run, for 
running was beyond me now. I heard Bobs barking, 
and the Twins crying, and I saw Whinnie. I thought 
for one fond and foolish moment, as I hurried toward 
the house, that they’d found my Dinkie. But it was 
'a false hope. Whinnie had been frightened at the 
empty shack and the wailing babies, and had thought 
something might have happened to me. So he had 
taken my duck-gun and fired those signal-shots. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


139 


He leaned against the muddy wagon-wheel and said 
“Guid God! Guid God!” over and over again, when 
I told him Dinkie was lost. Then he flung down the 
gun and drew his twisted old body up, peering 
through the twilight at my face. 

I suppose it frightened him a little. 

“Dinna fear, lassie, dinna fear,” he said. He said 
it in such a deep and placid voice that it carried con- 
solation to my spirit, and brought a shadow of con- 
viction trailing along behind it. “We’ll find him. I 
say it before the livin’ God, we'll -find him!" 

But that little candle of hope went out in the cold 
air, for I could see that night was coming closer, cold 
and dark and silent. I forgot about Whinnie, and 
didn’t even notice which direction he took when he 
strode off on his lame foot. But I called Bobs to me, 
and tried to quiet his whimpering, and talked to him, 
and told him Dinkie was lost, the little Dinkie we all 
loved, and implored him to go and find my boy for me. 

But the poor dumb creature didn’t seem to under- 
stand me, for he cringed and trembled and showed a 
tendency to creep off to the stable and hide there, as 
though the weight of this great evil which had be- 
fallen his house lay on him and him alone. And I 
was trying to coax the whimpering Bobs back to the 
shack-steps when Dinky-Dunk himself came galloping 
up through the uncertain light, with Lady Alicia a 
few hundred yards behind him. 


140 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“Have you found him?” my husband asked, quick 
and curt. But there was a pale greenish-yellow tint 
to his face that made me think of Rocquefort cheese. 

“No,” I told him. I tried to speak calmly, deter- 
mined not to break down and make a scene there before 
Lady Alicia, who’d reined up, stock-still, and sat star- 
ing in front of her, without a spoken word. 

I could see Dinky-Dunk’s mouth harden. 

“Have you any clue — any hint?” he asked, and I 
could catch the quaver in his voice as he spoke. 

“Not a thing,” I told him, remembering that we 
were losing time. “He simply wandered off, when 
that Indian girl wasn’t looking. He didn’t even have 
a cap or a coat on.” 

I heard Lady Alicia, who had slipped down out of 
the saddle, make a little sound as I said this. It was 
half a gasp and half a groan of protest. For one 
brief moment Dinky-Dunk stared at her, almost 
accusingly, I thought. Then he swung his horse 
savagely about, and called out over our heads. Other 
horsemen, I found, had come loping up in the ghostly 
twilight where we stood. I could see the breath from 
their mounts’ nostrils, white in the frosty air. 

“You, Teetzel, and you, O’Malley,” called my hus- 
band, in an oddly authoritative and barking voice, 
“and you on the roan there, swing twenty paces out 
from one another and circle the shack. Then widen 
the circle, each turn. There’s no use calling, for the 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


111 


boy’ll be down. He’ll be done out. But don’t speak 
until you see something. And for the love of God, 
watch close. He’s not three yet, remember. He 
couldn’t have got far away !” 

I should have found something reassuring in those 
quick and purposeful words of command, but they 
only served to bring the horror of the situation closer 
home to me. They brought before me more graphic- 
ally than ever the thought that I’d been trying to 
get out of my head, the picture of a huddled small 
body, with a tear-washed face, growing colder and 
colder, until the solitary little flame of life went com- 
pletely out in the midst of that star-strewui darkness. 
Only too willingly, I knew, I would have covered that 
chilling body with the warmth of my own, though wild 
horses rode over me until the end of time. I tried to 
picture life without Dinkie. I tried to imagine my 
home without that bright and friendly little face, 
without the patter of those restless little feet, without 
the sound of those beleaguering little coos of child- 
love with which he used to burrow his head into the 
hollow of my shoulder. 

It was too much for me. I had to lean against 
the wagon-wheel and gulp. It was Lady Alicia, 
emerging from the shack, who brought me back to the 
world about me. I could just see her as she stood 
beside me, for night had fallen by this time, night 
nearly as black as the blackness of my own heart. 


142 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“Look here,” she said almost gruffly. “Whatever 
happens, you’ve got to have something to drink. I’ve 
got a kettle on, and I’m going back to make tea, or a 
pot of coffee, or whatever I can find.” 

“Tea?” I echoed, as the engines of indignation 
raced in my shaken body. “Tea? It sounds pretty, 
doesn’t it, sitting down to a pink tea, when there’s a 
human being dying somewhere out in that darkness !” 

My bitterness, however, had no visible effect on 
Lady Alicia. 

“Perhaps coffee would be better,” she coolly 
amended. “And those babies of yours are crying 
their heads off in there, and I don’t seem to be able to 
do anything to stop them. I rather fancy they’re in 
need of feeding, aren’t they?” 

It was then and then only that I remembered about 
my poor neglected Twins. I groped my way in 
through the darkness, quite calm again, and sat down 
and unbuttoned my waist and nursed Poppsy, and 
then took up the indignant and wailing Pee-Wee, 
vaguely wondering if the milk in my breast wouldn’t 
prove poison to them and if all my blood hadn’t 
turned to acid. 

I was still nursing Pee-Wee when Bud Teetzel 
came into the shack and asked how many lanterns we 
had about the place. There was a sullen look on his 
face, and his eyes refused to meet mine. So I knew 
his search had not succeeded. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


143 


Then young O’Malley came in and asked for 
matches, and I knew even before he spoke, that he too 
had failed. They had all failed. 

I could hear Dinky-Dunk’s voice outside, a little 
hoarse and throaty. I felt very tired, as I put Pee- 
Wee back in his cradle. It seemed as though an 
invisible hand were squeezing the life out of my body 
and making it hard for me to breathe. I could hear 
the cows bawling, reminding the world that they had 
not yet been milked. I could smell the strong coffee 
that Lady Alicia was pouring out into a cup. She 
stepped on something as she carried it to me. She 
stopped to pick it up — and it was one of Dinkie’s 
little stub-toed button shoes. 

“Let me see it,” I commanded, as she made a foolish 
effort to get it out of sight. I took it from her and 
turned it over in my hand. That was the way, I 
remembered, mothers turned over the shoes of the 
children they had lost, the children who could never, 
never, so long as they worked and waited and listened 
in this wide world, come back to them again. 

Then I put down the shoe, for I could hear one of 
the men outside say that the upper muskeg ought 
to be dragged. 

“Try that cup of coffee now,” suggested Lady 
Alicia. I liked her quietness. I admired her calm- 
ness, under the circumstances. And I remembered 
that I ought to give some evidence of this by accept- 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


144 

ing the hot drink she had made for me. So I took 
the coffee and drank it. The bawling of my milk- 
cows, across the cold night air, began to annoy me. 

“My cows haven’t been milked,” I complained. It 
was foolish, but I couldn’t help it. Then I reached 
out for Dinkie’s broken-toed shoe, and studied it for 
a long time. Lady Alicia crossed to the shack door, 
and stood staring out through it. 

She was still standing there when Whinnie came in, 
with the stable lantern in his hand, and brushed her 
aside. He came to where I was sitting and knelt down 
in front of me, on the shack-floor, with his heavy 
rough hand on my knee. I could smell the stable- 
manure that clung to his shoes. 

“God has been guid to ye, ma’am!” he said in a 
rapt voice, which was little more than an awed whisper. 
But it was more his eyes, with the uncanny light in 
them making them shine like a dog’s, that brought 
me to my feet. For I had a sudden feeling that there 
was Something just outside the door which he hadn’t 
dared to bring in to me, a little dead body with 
pinched face and trailing arms. 

I tried to speak, but I couldn’t. I merely gulped. 
And Whinnie’s rough hand pushed me back into 
my chair. 

“Dinna greet,” he said, with two tears creeping 
crookedly down his own seamed and wind-rough- 
ened face. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


145 


But I continued to gulp. 

“Dinna greet, for your laddie's safe and sound!" 
I heard the rapt voice saying. 

I could hear what he’d said, quite distinctly, yet 
his words seemed without color, without meaning, 
without sense. 

“Have you found him?” called out Lady Alicia 
sharply. 

“Aye, he’s found,” said Wliinnie, with an exultant 
gulp of his own, but without so much as turning to 
look at that other woman, who, apparently, was of 
small concern to him. His eyes were on me, and he 
was very intimately patting my leg, without quite 
knowing it. 

“He says that the child’s been found,” interpreted 
Lady Alicia, obviously disturbed by the expression on 
my face. 

“He’s just yon, as warm and safe as a bird in a 
nest,” further expounded Whinstane Sandy. 

“Where?” demanded Lady Alicia. But Whinnie 
ignored her. 

“It was Bobs, ma’am,” were the blessed wx>rds I 
heard the old lips saying to me, “who kept whimper- 
in’ and grievin’ about the upper stable door, which 
had been swung shut. It was Bobs who led me back 
yon, fair against my will. And there I found our 
laddie, asleep in the manger of Slip-Along, nested 
deep in the hay, as safe and warm as if in his own bed.” 


146 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


I didn’t speak or move for what must have been a 
full minute. I couldn’t. I felt as though my soul 
had been inverted and emptied of all feeling, like a 
wine-glass that’s turned over. For a full minute I 
sat looking straight ahead of me. Then I got up, and 
went to where I remembered Dinky-Dunk kept his 
revolver. I took it up and started to cross to the open 
door. But Lady Alicia caught me sharply by the 
arm. 

“What are you doing?” she gasped, imagining, I 
suppose, that I’d gone mad and was about to blow my 
brains out. She even took the firearm from my hand. 

“It’s the men,” I tried to explain. “They should 
be told. Give them three signal-shots to bring them 
in.” Then I turned to Whinnie. He nodded and 
took me by the hand. 

“Now take me to my boy,” I said very quietly. 

I was still quite calm, I think. But deep down in- 
side of me I could feel a faint glow. It wasn’t alto- 
gether joy, and it wasn’t altogether relief. It was 
something which left me just a little bewildered, a 
good deal like a school-girl after her first glass of 
champagne at Christmas dinner. It left me oddly 
self -immured, miles and miles from the figures so close 
to me, remote even from the kindly old man who hob- 
bled a little and went with a decided list to starboard 
as he led me out toward what he always spoke of as 
the upper stable. 



He was warm and breathing, and safe and sound 



THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


147 


Yet at the back of my brain, all the while, was some 
shadow of doubt, of skepticism, of reiterated self- 
warning that it was all too good to be true. It wasn’t 
until I looked over the well-gnawed top rail of Slip- 
Along’s broken manger and saw that blessed boy there, 
by the light of Whinnie’s lantern, saw that blessed 
boy of mine half buried in that soft and cushioning 
prairie-grass, saw that he was warm and breathing, 
and safe and sound, that I fully realized how he had 
been saved for me. 

“The laddie’d been after a clutch of eggs, I’m 
thinkin’,” whispered Whinnie to me, pointing to a 
yellow stain on his waist, which was clearly caused by 
the yolk of a broken egg. And Whinnie stooped 
over to take Dinkie up in his arms, but I pushed him 
aside. 

“No, I’ll take him,” I announced. 

He’d be the hungry boy when he awakened, I re- 
membered as I gathered him up in my arms. My 
knees were a bit shaky, as I carried him back to the 
shack, but I did my best to disguise that fact. I 
could have carried him, I believe, right on to Buck- 
horn, he seemed such a precious burden. And I was 
glad of that demand for physical expenditure. It 
seemed to bring me down to earth again, to get things 
back into perspective. But for the life of me I 
couldn’t find a word to say to Lady Allie as I walked 
into my home with Dinky-Dink in my arms. She 


148 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


stood watching me for a moment or two as I started 
to undress him, still heavy with slumber. Then she 
seemed to realize that she was, after all, an outsider, 
and slipped out through the door. I was glad she 
did, for a minute later Dinkie began to whimper and 
cry, as any child would with an empty stomach and an 
over-draft of sleep. It developed into a good lusty 
bawl, which would surely have spoilt the picture to 
an outsider. But it did a good turn in keeping me 
too busy to pump any more brine on my own part. 

When Dinky-Dunk came in I was feeding little 
Dinkie a bowl of hot tapioca well drowned in cream 
and sugar. My lord and master took off his hat — 
which struck me as funny — and stood regarding us 
from just inside the door. He stood there by the door 
for quite a long wdiile. 

“Hadn’t I better stay here with you to-night?” he 
finally asked, in a voice that didn’t sound a bit like 
his own. 

I looked up at him. But he stood well back from 
the range of the lamplight and I found it hard to de- 
cipher his expression. The one feeling I was certain 
of was a vague feeling of disappointment. What 
caused it, I could not say. But it was there. 

“After what’s happened,” I told him as quietly as 
I could, “I think I’d rather be alone !” 

He stood for another moment or two, apparently 
letting this sink in. It wasn’t until he’d turned and 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


149 


walked out of the door that I realized the ambiguity 
of that retort of mine. I was almost prompted to go 
after him. But I checked myself by saying: “Well, 
if the shoe fits, put it on !” But in my heart of hearts 
I didn’t mean it. I wanted him to come back. I 
wanted him to share my happiness with me, to sit and 
talk the thing over, to exploit it to the full in a sweet 
retrospect of relief, as people seem to want to do after 
they’ve safely passed through great peril. 

It wasn’t until half an hour later, when Dinkie was 
sound asleep again and tucked away in his crib, that I 
remembered my frantic promises to God to forgive 
Dinky-Dunk everything, if He’d only bring my boy 
back to me. And there’d been other promises, equally 
foolish and frantic. I’ve been thinking them over, in 
fact, and I am going to make an effort to keep them. 
I’m so happy that it hurts. And when you’re happy 
you want other people to be that way, too. 


Wednesday the Third 


Humor is the salt of life. The older I grow the 
more I realize that truth. And I’m going to keep 
more of it, if I can, in the work-room of my soul. 
Last night, when Dinky-Dunk and I were so uppish 
with each other, one single clap of humor might have 
shaken the solemnity out of the situation and shown 
us up for the poseurs we really were. But Pride is 
the mother of all contention. If Dinky-Dunk, when 
I was so imperially dismissing him from his own home, 
had only up and said: “Look here, Lady-bird, this 
is as much my house as it is yours, you feather-headed 
little idiot, and I’ll put a June-bug down your neck 
if you don’t let me stay here !” If he’d only said that, 
and sat down and been the safety-valve to my emotions 
which all husbands ought to be to all wives, the igloo 
would have melted about my heart and left me nothing 
to do but crawl over to him and tell him that I missed 
him more than tongue could tell, and that getting 
Dinkie’s daddy back was almost as good as getting 
Dinkie himself back to me. 

But we missed our chance. And I suppose Lady 
Allie sat up until all hours of the night, over at Casa 
Grande, consoling my Diddums and talking things 
150 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


151 


over. It gives me a sort of bruised feeling, for I’ve 
nobody but Whinstane Sandy to unbosom my soul 
to. . . . 

Iroquois Annie has flown the coop. She has gone 
for good. I must have struck terror deeper into the 
heart of that Redskin than I imagined, for rather 
than face death and torture at my hands she left 
Slip- Along and the buckboard at the Teetzel Ranch 
and vamoosed off into the great unknown. I have 
done up her valuables in an old sugar-sack, and if 
they’re not sent for in a week’s time I’ll make a bon- 
fire of the truck. Whinnie, by the way, is to help me 
with the house-work. He is much better at washing 
dishes than I ever thought he could be. And he an- 
nounces he can make a fair brand of bannock, if we 
run out of bread. 


Tuesday the Ninth 


I’ve got a hired man. He dropped like manna, 
out of the skies, or, rather, he emerged like a tad- 
pole out of the mud. But there’s something odd about 
him and I’ve a floaty idea he’s a refugee from justice 
and that some day one of the Mounties will come rid- 
ing up to my shack-door and lead my farm-help away 
in handcuffs. 

Whatever he is, I can’t quite make him out. But I 
have my suspicions, and I’m leaving everything in 
abeyance until they’re confirmed. 

I was on Paddy the other morning, in my old shoot- 
ing-jacket and Stetson, going like the wind for the 
Dixon Ranch, after hearing they had a Barnado boy 
they wanted to unload on anybody who’d undertake 
to keep him under control. The trail was heavy from 
the night rain that had swept the prairie like a new 
broom, but the sun was shining again and the air was 
like champagne. The ozone and the exercise and 
Paddy’s legato stride all tended to key up my spirits, 
and I went along humming: 

“Bake me a bannock, 

And cut me a callop, 

For I’ve stole me a grey mare 
And I’m off at a gallop !” 

152 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


153 


It wasn’t until I saw Paddy’s ear prick up like a 
rabbit’s that I noticed the gun-boat on the trail ahead. 
At least I thought it was a gun-boat, for a minute or 
two, until I cantered closer and saw that is was a huge 
gray touring-car half foundered in the prairie-mud. 
Beside it sat a long lean man in very muddy clothes 
and a rather disreputable-looking hat. He sat with a 
ridiculously contented look on his face, smoking a 
small briar pipe, and he laughed outright as I circled 
his mud-hole and came to a stop opposite the car with 
its nose poked deep down in the mire, for all the world 
like a rooting shote. 

“Good morning, Diana,” he said, quite coolly, as he 
removed his battered-looking cap. 

His salutation struck me as impertinent, so I re- 
turned it in the curtest of nods. 

“Are you in trouble?” I asked. 

“None whatever,” he airily replied, still eying me. 
“But my car seems to be, doesn’t it?” 

“What’s wrong?” I demanded, determined that he 
shouldn’t elbow me out of my matter-of-factness. 

He turned to his automobile and inspected it with an’ 
indifferent eye. 

“I turned this old tub into a steam-engine, racing 
her until the water boiled, and she got even with me 
by blowing up an intake hose. But I’m perfectly sat- 
isfied.” 

“With what?” I coldly inquired. 


154 ? 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“With being stuck here,” he replied. He had 
rather a bright gray eye with greenish lights in it, and 
he looked rational enough. But there was something 
fundamentally wrong with him. 

“What makes you feel that way?” I asked, though 
for a moment I’d been prompted to inquire if they 
hadn’t let him out a little too soon. 

“Because I wouldn’t have seen you, who should be 
wearing a crescent moon on your brow, if my good 
friend Hyacinthe hadn’t mired herself in this mud- 
hole,” he had the effrontery to tell me. 

“Is there anything so remarkably consolatory in 
that vision?” I asked, deciding that I might as well 
convince him he wasn’t confronting an untutored she- 
coolie of the prairie. Whereupon he studied me more 
pointedly and more impersonally than ever. 

“It’s more than consolatory,” he said with an ac- 
centuating flourish of the little briar pipe. “It’s quite 
compensatory.” 

It was rather ponderously clever, I suppose; but 
I was tired of both verbal quibbling and roadside 
gallantry* 

“Do you want to get out of that hole?” I demanded. 
For it’s a law of the prairie-land, of course, never to 
side-step a stranger in distress. 

“Not if it means an ending to this interview,” he 
told me. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


155 


It was my turn to eye him. But there wasn’t much 
warmth in the inspection. 

“What are you trying to do?” I calmly inquired, 
for prairie life hadn’t exactly left me a shy and timor- 
ous gazelle in the haunts of that stalker known as 
Man. 

“I’m trying to figure out,” he just as calmly re- 
torted, apparently quite unimpressed by my uppity 
tone, “how anything as radiant and lovely as you ever 
got landed up here in this heaven of chilblains and 
coyotes.” 

The hare-brained idiot was actually trying to make 
love to me. And I then and there decided to put a 
brake on his wheel of eloquence. 

“And I’m still trying to figure out,” I told him, 
“how what impresses me as rather a third-class type 
of man is able to ride around in what looks like a 
first-class car ! Unless,” and the thought came to me 
out of a clear sky, and when they come that way 
they’re inspirations and are usually true, “unless you 
stole it!” 

He turned a solemn eye on the dejected-looking 
vehicle and studied it from end to end. 

“If I’m that far behind Hyacinthe,” he indiffer- 
ently acknowledged, “I begin to fathom the secret 
of my life failure. So my morning hasn’t been alto- 
gether wasted.” 


156 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“But you did steal the car?” I persisted. 

“That must be a secret between us,” he said, with 
a distinctly guilty look about the sky-line, as though 
to make sure there were no sheriffs and bloodhounds 
on his track. 

“What are you doing here?” I demanded, deter- 
mined to thrash the thing out, now that it had been 
thrust upon me. 

“Talking to the most charming woman I’ve en- 
countered west of the Great Lakes,” he said with an 
ironic and yet a singularly engaging smile. But I 
didn’t intend him to draw a herring across the trail. 

“I’d be obliged if you’d be sincere,” I told him, 
sitting up a little straighter on Paddy. 

“I am sincere,” he protested, putting away his pipe. 

“But the things you’re saying are the things the 
right sort of person refrains from expressing, even 
when he happens to be the victim of their operation.” 

“Yes, that’s quite true, in drawing-rooms,” he airily 
amended. “But this is God’s open and untrammeled 
prairie.” 

“Where crudeness is king,” I added. 

“Where candor is worth more than convention,” he 
corrected, with rather a wistful look in his eye. “And 
where we mortals ought to be at least as urbane as 
that really wonderful robin-egg sky up there with the 
chinook arch across it.” 

He wasn’t flippant any more, and I had a sense of 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


157 


triumph in forcing his return to sobriety. I wanted to 
ask him what his name was, once we were back to earth 
again. But as that seemed a little too direct, I merely 
inquired where his home happened to be. 

“I’ve just come from up North!” he said. And 
that, I promptly realized, was an evasive way of 
answering an honest question, especially as there was 
a California license-number on the front of his car. 

“And what’s your business ?” I inquired, deciding to 
try him out with still one more honest question. 

“I’m a windmill man,” he told me, as he waded in 
toward his dejected-looking automobile and lifted up 
its hood. I took him literally, for there wasn’t any- 
thing, at the time, to make me think of Cervantes. 
But I’d already noticed his hands, and I felt sure they 
weren’t the hands of a laboring man. They were long 
and lean and finicky-fingered hands, the sort that could 
span an octave much better than they could hold a 
hayfork. And I decided to see him hoisted by his own 
petard. 

“Then you’re just the man Pm looking for,” I told 
him. He stopped for a moment to look up from the 
bit of heavy rubber-hose he was winding with a stretch 
of rubber that looked as though it had been cut from 
an inner tube. 

“Words such as those are honey to my ears,” he 
said as he went on with his work. And I saw it was 
necessary to yank him down to earth again. 


158 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“I’ve a broken-down windmill over on my ranch,” 
I told him. “And if you’re what you say you are, you 
ought to be able to put it in running order for me.” 

“Then you’ve a ranch?” he observed, stopping in 
his work. 

“A ranch and a husband and three children,” I told 
him with the well-paraded air of a tabby-cat who’s 
dragged her last mouse into the drawing-room. But 
my announcement didn’t produce the effect I’d counted 
on. All I could see on the face of the windmill man 
was a sort of mild perplexity. 

“That only deepens the mystery,” he observed, ap- 
parently as much to himself as to me. 

“What mystery?” I asked. 

“You !” he retorted. 

“What’s wrong with me?” I demanded. 

“You’re so absurdly alive and audacious and sensi- 
tive and youthful-hearted, dear madam! Eor the life 
of me I can’t quite fit you into the narrow little frame 
you mention.” 

“Is it so narrow?” I inquired, wondering why I 
wasn’t much more indignant at him. But instead of 
answering that question, he asked me another. 

“Why hasn’t this husband of yours fixed the wind- 
mill?” he casually asked over his shoulder, as he re- 
sumed his tinkering on the car-engine. 

“My husband’s work keeps him away from home,” 
I explained, promptly on the defensive. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


159 


“I thought so,” he announced, with the expression 
of a man who’s had a pet hypothesis unexpectedly 
confirmed. 

“Then what made you think so?” I demanded, with 
a feeling that he was in some way being subtler than 
I could quite comprehend. 

“Instinct — if you care to call it that,” he said as 
he stooped low over his engine. He seemed offensively 
busy there for a considerable length of time. I could 
see that he was not what in the old days I’d have 
called a window-dresser. And I rather liked that 
pretense of candor in his make-up, just as I cottoned 
to that melodious drawl of his, not altogether unlike 
Lady Alicia’s, with its untoward suggestion of power 
and privilege. He was a man with a mind of his own ; 
there was no denying that. I was even compelled to 
remind myself that with all his coolness and suavity 
he was still a car-thief, or perhaps something worse. 
And I had no intention of sitting there and watching 
him pitch shut-out ball. 

“What are you going to do about it?” I asked, after 
he’d finished his job of bailing ditch-water into his 
car-radiator with a little collapsible canvas bucket. 

He climbed into his driving-seat, mud to the knees, 
before he answered me. 

“I’m going to get Hyacinthe out of this hole,” was 
what he said. “And then I’m going to fix that wind- 
mill!” 


160 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“On what terms?” I inquired. 

“What’s the matter with a month’s board and 
keep?” he suggested. 

It rather took my breath away, but I tried not to 
betray the fact. He was a refugee, after all, and only 
too anxious to go into hiding for a few weeks. 

“Can you milk?” I demanded, deciding to keep him 
in his place, from the start. And he sadly acknowl- 
edged that he wasn’t able to milk. Windmill men sel- 
dom were, he casually asserted. 

“Then you’ll have to make yourself handy, in other 
ways,” I proclaimed as he sat appraising me from his 
deep-padded car-seat. 

“All right,” he said, as though the whole thing were 
settled, on the spot. But it wasn’t so simple as it 
seemed. 

“How about this car?” I demanded. His eye met 
mine; and I made note of the fact that he was com- 
pelled to look away. 

“I suppose we’ll have to hide it somewhere,” he 
finally acknowledged. 

“And how’ll you hide a car of that size on the open 
prairie?” I inquired. 

“Couldn’t we bury it ?” he asked with child-like sim- 
plicity. 

“It’s pretty well that way now, isn’t it? But I saw 
it three miles off,” I reminded him. 

“Couldn’t we pile a load of prairie-hay over it?” 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


161 


he suggested next, with the natural cunning of the 
criminal. “Then they’d never suspect.” 

“Suspect what?” I asked. 

“Suspect where we got it,” he explained. 

“Kindly do not include me in any of your activities 
of this nature,” I said with all the dignity that Paddy 
would permit of, for he was getting restless by this 
time. 

“But you’ve included yourself in the secret,” he 
tried to argue, with a show of injured feelings. “And 
surely, after you’ve wormed that out of me, you’re 
not going to deliver a poor devil over to — ” 

“You can have perfect confidence in me,” I inter- 
rupted, trying to be stately but only succeeding, I’m 
afraid, in being stiff. And he nodded and laughed 
in a companionable and laisser-faire sort of way as 
he started his engine and took command of the wheel. 

Then began a battle which I had to watch from a 
distance because Paddy evinced no love for that pur- 
ring and whining thing of steel as it rumbled and 
roared and thrashed and churned up the mud at its 
flying heels. It made the muskeg look like a gar- 
gantuan cake-batter, in which it seemed to float as 
dignified and imperturbable as a schooner in a canal- 
lock. But the man at the wheel kept his temper, and 
reversed, and writhed forward, and reversed again. 
He even waved at me, in a grim sort of gaiety, as he 
rested his engine and then went back to the struggle. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


' 162 

He kept engaging and releasing his clutch until he 
was able to impart a slight rocking movement to the 
car. And again the big motor roared and churned up 
, the mud and again Paddy took to prancing and 
, pirouetting like a two-year-old. But this time the 
spinning rear wheels appeared to get a trace of trac- 
tion, flimsy as it was, for the throbbing gray mass 
moved forward a little, subsided again, and once more 
nosed a few inches ahead. Then the engine whined 
in a still higher key, and slowly but surely that mud- 
covered mass emerged from the swale that had sought 
' to engulf and possess it, emerged slowly and awk- 
wardly, like a dinosauros emerging from its primeval 
ooze. 

The man in the car stepped down from his driving- 
seat, once he was sure of firm ground under his wheels 
again, and walked slowly and wistfully about his res- 
urrected devil-wagon. 

“The wages of sin is mud,” he said as I trotted up 
to him. “And how much better it would have been, 
O Singing Pine-Tree, if I’d never taken that car !” 

The poor chap was undoubtedly a little wrong in 
the head, but likable withal, and not ill-favored in 
appearance, and a man that one should try to make 
allowances for. 

“It would have been much better,” I agreed, won- 
dering how long it would be before the Mounted Police 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


163 


would be tracking him down and turning him to mak- 
ing brooms in the prison-factory at Welrina. 

“Now, if you’ll kindly trot ahead,” he announced 
as he relighted his little briar pipe, “and show me the 
trail to the ranch of the blighted windmill, I’ll idle 
along behind you.” 

I resented the placidity with which he was accept- 
ing a situation that should have called for consider- 
able meekness on his part. And I sat there for a 
silent moment or two on Paddy, to make that resent- 
ment quite obvious to him. 

“What’s your name?” I asked, the same as I’d ask 
the name of any new help that arrived at Alabama 
Ranch. 

“Peter Ketley,” he said, for once both direct and 
sober-eyed. 

“All right, Peter,” I said, as condescendingly as I 
was able. “Just follow along, and I’ll show you where 
the bunk-house is.” 

It was his grin, I suppose, that irritated me. So 
I started off on Paddy and went like the wind. I don’t 
know whether he called it idling or not, but once or 
twice when I glanced back at him that touring-car was 
bounding like a reindeer over some of the rougher 
places in the trail, and I rather fancy it got some of 
the mud shaken off its running-gear before it pulled 
up behind the upper stable at Alabama Ranch. 


164 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“You ride like a ritt-meister,” he said, with an ap- 
provingly good-natured wag of the head, as he came 
up as close as Paddy would permit. 

“ Danke-schon /” I rather listlessly retorted. “And 
if you leave the car here, close beside this hay-stack, 
it’ll probably not be seen until after dinner. Then 
some time this afternoon, if the coast is clear, you can 
get it covered up.” 

I was a little sorry, the next moment, that I’d 
harped still again on an act which must have become 
painful for him to remember, since I could see his 
face work and his eye betray a tendency to evade mine. 
But he thanked me, and explained that he was entirely 
in my hands. 

Such being the case, I was more excited than I’d 
have been willing to admit when I led him into the 
shack. Frontier life had long since taught me not 
to depend too much on appearances, but the right 
sort of people, the people who out here are called 
“good leather,” would remain the right sort of people 
in even the roughest wickiup. We may have been 
merely ranchers, but I didn’t want Peter, whatever 
his morals, to think that we ate our food raw off the 
bone and made fire by rubbing sticks together. 

Yet he must have come pretty close to believing 
that, unimpeachable as his manners remained, for 
Whinnie had burned the roast of veal to a charry mass, 
the Twins were crying like mad, and Dinkie had 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


165 


painted himself and most of the dining-room table 
with Worcestershire sauce. I showed Peter where he 
could wash up and where he could find a whisk to re- 
move the dried mud from his person. Then I hur- 
riedly appeased my complaining bairns, opened a can 
of beans to take the place of Whinnie’s boiled pota- 
toes, which most unmistakably tasted of yellow soap, 
and supplemented what looked dishearteningly like a 
Dixon dinner with my last carefully treasured jar of 
raspberry preserve. 

Whinstane Sandy, it is true, remained as glum and 
silent as a glacier through all that meal. But my 
new man, Peter, talked easily and uninterruptedly. 
And he talked amazingly well. He talked about moun- 
tain goats, and the Morgan rose-j ars in the Metropol- 
itan, and why he disliked George Moore, and the dif- 
ference between English and American slang, and why 
English women always wear the wrong sort of hats, 
and the poetry in Indian names if we only had the 
brains to understand ’em, and how the wheat I’d man- 
ufactured my home-made bread out of was made up 
of cellulose and germ and endosperm, and how the al- 
cohol and carbonic acid gas of the fermented yeast 
affected the gluten, and how the woman who could 
make bread like that ought to have a specially de- 
signed decoration pinned on her apron-front. Then 
he played “Paddy-cake, paddy-cake, Baker’s man,” 
with Dinkie, who took to him at once, and when I 


166 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


came back from getting the extra cot ready in the 
bunk-house, my infant prodigy was on the new hired 
man’s back, circling the dinner-table and shouting 
“Gid-dap, ’ossie, gid-dap!” as he went, a proceeding 
which left the seamed old face of Whinstane Sandy 
about as blithe as a coffin-lid. So I coldly informed 
the newcomer that I’d show him where he could put his 
things, if he had any, before we went out to look over 
the windmill. And Peter rather astonished me by 
lugging back from the motor-car so discreetly left in 
the rear a huge suit-case of pliable pigskin that 
looked like a steamer-trunk with carrying-handles at- 
tached to it, a laprobe lined with beaver, a llama-wool 
sweater made like a Nor folk- jacket, a chamois-lined 
ulster, a couple of plaid woolen rugs, and a lunch-kit 
in a neatly embossed leather case. 

“Quite a bit of loot, isn’t it?” he said, a little red in 
the face from the effort of portaging so pretentious a 
load. 

That word “loot” stuck in my craw. It was a pain- 
ful reminder of something that I’d been trying very 
hard to forget. 

“Did it come with the car?” I (demanded. 

“Yes, it came with the car,” he was compelled to 
acknowledge. “But it would be exhausting, don’t you 
see, to have to tunnel through a hay-stack every time 
I wanted a hair-brush !” 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


167 


I icily agreed that it would, scenting tacit reproof 
in that mildly-put observation of his. But I didn’t 
propose to be trifled with. I calmly led Mr. Peter 
Ketley out to where the overturned windmill tower 
lay like a museum skeleton along its bed of weeds and 
asked him just what tools he’d need. It was a simple 
question, predicating a simple answer. Yet he didn’t 
seem able to reply to it. He scratched his close- 
clipped pate and said he’d have to look things over 
and study it out. Windmills were tricky things, one 
kind demanding this sort of treatment and another 
kind demanding that. 

“You’ll have no trouble, of course, in raising the 
tower?” I asked, looking him square in the eye. More 
than once I’d seen these windmill towers of galvanized 
steel girders put up on the prairie, and I had a very 
good idea of how the thing was done. They were as- 
sembled lying on the ground, and then a heavy plank 
was bolted to the bottom side of the tower base. This 
plank was held in place by two big stakes. Then a 
block and tackle was attached to the upper part of the 
tower, with the running-rope looped over a tripod of 
poles, to act as a fulcrum, so that when a team of 
horses was attached to the tackle the tower pivoted on 
its base and slowly rose in the air, steadied by a couple 
of guy-ropes held out at right angles to it. 

“Oh, no trouble at all,” replied the expert quite air- 


168 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


ily. But I noticed that his eye held an especially ab- 
stracted and preoccupied expression. 

“Just how is it done?” I innocently inquired. 

“Well, that all depends,” he sapiently observed. 
Then, apparently nettled by my obviously superior 
smile, he straightened up and said: “I want you to 
leave this entirely to me. It’s my problem, and you’ve 
no right to be worried over it. It’ll take stud}q of 
course, and it’ll take time. Rome wasn’t built in a 
day. But before I leave you, madam, your tower will 
be up.” 

“I hope you’re not giving yourself a life sentence,” 
I remarked as I turned and left him. 

I knew that he was looking after me as I went, but 
I gave no outer sign of that inner knowledge. I was 
equally conscious of his movements, through the shack 
window, when he possessed himself of a hay-fork and 
with more than one backward look over his shoulder 
circled out to where his car still stood. He tooled it 
still closer up beside the hay-stack, which he mounted, 
and then calmly and cold-bloodedly buried under a 
huge mound of sun-cured prairie-grass that relic of a 
past crime which he seemed only too willing to obliter- 
ate. 

But he was callous, I could see, for once that tell- 
tale car was out of sight, he appeared much more in- 
terested in the water-blisters on his hands than the 
stain on his character. I could even see him inspect 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


169 


his fingers, from time to time, as he tried to round 
off the top of his very badly made stack, and test the 
joints by opening and closing them, as though not 
quite sure they were still in working order. And when 
the stack-making was finished and he returned to the 
windmill, circling about the fallen tower and examin- 
ing its mechanism and stepping off its dimensions, I 
noticed that he kept feeling the small of his back and 
glancing toward the stack in what seemed an attitude 
of resentment. 

When Whinnie came in with one of the teams, after 
his day a-field, I noticed that Peter approached him 
blithely and attempted to draw him into secret consul- 
tation. But Whinnie, as far as I could see, had no 
palate for converse with suspicious-looking strangers. 
Pie walked several times, in fact, about that mysteri- 
ous new hay-stack, and moved shackward more dour 
and silent than ever. So that evening the worthy 
Peter was a bit silent and self-contained, retiring early, 
though I strongly suspected, and still suspect, that 
he’d locked himself in the bunk-house to remove unob- 
served all the labels from his underwear. 

In the morning his appearance was not that of a 
man at peace with his own soul. He even asked me if 
he might have a horse and rig to go in to the nearest 
town for some new parts which he’d need for the 
windmill. And he further inquired if I’d mind him 
bringing back a tent to sleep in. 


170 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“Did you find the bunk-house uncomfortable ?” I 
asked, noticing again the heavy look about his eyes. 

“It’s not the bunk-house,” he admitted. “It’s that 
old Caledonian saw-mill with the rock-ribbed face.” 

“What’s the matter with Whinnie?” I demanded, 
with a quick touch of resentment. And Peter looked 
up in astonishment. 

“Do you mean you’ve never heard him — and your 
shack not sixty paces away?” 

“Pleard him what?” I asked. 

“Heard him snore," explained Peter, with a sigh. 

“Are you sure ?” I inquired, remembering the morn- 
ings when I’d had occasion to waken Whinnie, always 
to find him sleeping as silent and placid as one of my 
own babies. 

“I had eight hours of it in which to dissipate any 
doubts,” he pointedly explained. 

This mystified me, but to object to the tent, of 
course, would have been picayune. I had just the 
faintest of suspicions, however, that the fair Peter 
might never return from Buckhorn, though I tried to 
solace myself with the thought that the motor-car and 
the beaver-lined lap-robe would at least remain with 
me. But my fears were groundless. Before supper-time 
Peter was back in high spirits, with the needed new 
parts for the windmill, and an outfit of blue denim 
apparel for himself, and a little red sweater for Dinkie, 
and an armful of magazines for myself. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


171 


Whinnie, as he stood watching Peter’s return, clear- 
ly betrayed the disappointment which that return in- 
volved. He said nothing, but when he saw my eye 
upon him he gazed dourly toward his approaching 
rival and tapped a weather-beaten brow with one 
stubby finger. He meant, of course, that Peter was 
a little locoed. 

But Peter is not. He is remarkably clear-headed 
and quick- thoughted, and if there’s any madness about 
him it’s a madness with a deep-laid method. The one 
thing that annoys me is that he keeps me so continu- 
ously and yet so obliquely under observation. He 
pretends to be studying out my windmill, but he is 
really trying to study out its owner. Whinnie, I 
know, won’t help him much. And I refuse to rise to 
his gaudiest flies. So he’s still puzzling over what he 
regards as an anomaly, a farmerette who knows the 
difference between De Bussey and a side-delivery horse- 
rake, a mother of three children who can ride a pinto 
and play a banjo, a clodhopper in petticoats who can 
talk about Ragusa and Toarmina and the summer 
races at Piping Rock. But it’s a relief to converse 
about something besides summer-fallowing and break- 
ing and seed-wheat and tractor-oil and cows’ teats. 
And it’s a stroke of luck to capture a farm-hand who 
can freshen you up on foreign opera at the same time 
that he campaigns against the domestic weed! 


Thursday the Eleventh 


We are a peaceful and humdrum family, very dif- 
ferent from, the westerners of the romantic movies. 
If we were the cinema kind of ranchers Pee-Wee would 
be cutting his teeth on a six-shooter, little Dinkie 
would be off rustling cattle, Poppsy would be away 
holding up the Transcontinental Limited, and Mumm- 
sie would be wearing chaps, toting a gun, and pretend- 
ing to the sheriff that her jail-breaking brother was 
! not hidden in the cellar ! 

Whereas, we are a good deal like the easterners who 
till the soil and try to make a home for themselves and 
their children, only we are without a great many of 
their conveniences, even though we do beat them out 
in the matter of soil. But breaking sod isn’t so pictur- 
esque as breaking laws, and a plow-handle isn’t so 
thrilling to the eye as a shooting-iron, so it’s mostly 
the blood-and- thunder type of westerners, from the 
ranch with the cow-brand name, who goes ki-yi-ing 
through picture and story, advertising us as an ag- 
gregation of train-robbers and road-agents and sher- 
iff-rabbits. And it’s a type that makes me tired. 

The open range, let it be remembered, is gone, and 
the cowboy is going after it. Even the broncho, they 
172 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 173 

tell me, is destined to disappear. It seems hard to 
think that the mustang will be no more, the mustang 
which Dinkj-Dunk once told me was the descendant 
of the three hundred Arab and Spanish horses which 
Cortez first carried across the Atlantic to Mexico. For 
we, the newcomers, mesh the open range with our barb- 
wire, and bring in what Mrs. Eagle-Moccasin called 
our “stink-wagon” to turn the grass upside down and 
grow wheat-berries where the buffalo once wallowed. 
But sometimes, even in this newfangled work-a-day 
world, I find a fresh spirit of romance, quite as glam- 
orous, if one has only the eye to see it, as the romance 
of the past. In one generation, almost, we are making 
a home-land out of a wilderness, we are conjuring up 
cities and threading the continent with steel, we are 
feeding the world on the best and cleanest wheat 
known to hungry man. And on these clear and opaline 
mornings when I see the prairie-floor waving with its 
harvest to be, and hear the clack and stutter of the 
tractor breaking sod on the outer quarter and leaving 
behind it the serried furrows of umber, I feel there is 
something primal and poetic in the picture, something 
mysteriously moving and epic. . . . 

The weather has turned quite warm again, with 
glorious spring days of winy and heart-tugging sun- 
light and cool and starry nights. In my spare time 
I’ve been helping Whinnie get in my “truck” garden, 
and Peter, who has reluctantly forsaken the windmill 


174 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


and learned to run the tractor, is breaking sod and 
summer-fallowing for me. For there is always an- 
other season to think of, and I don’t want the tin-can 
of failure tied to my spirit’s tail. As I say, the days 
slip by. Morning comes, fresh as a new-minted nickel, 
we mount the treadmill, and somebody rolls the big 
red ball off the table and it’s night again. But open- 
air work leaves me healthy, my children grow a-pace, 
and I should be most happy. 

But I’m not. 

I’m so homesick for something which I can’t quite 
define that it gives me a misty sort of ache just under 
the fifth rib. It’s just three weeks now since Dinky- 
Dunk has ventured over from Casa Grande. If this 
aloofness continues, he’ll soon need to be formally in- 
troduced to his own offspring when he sees them. 

Now that I have Peter out working on the land, I 
can safely give a little more time to my household. 
But meals are still more or less a scramble. Peter has 
ventured the opinion that he might get a Chinaman 
for me, if he could have a week off to root out the 
right sort of Chink. But I prefer that Peter sticks 
to his tractor, much as I need help in the house. 

My new hired man is still a good deal of a mystery 
to me, just as I seem to remain a good deal of a mys- 
tery to him. I’ve been asking myself just why it is 
that Peter is so easy to get along with, and why, in 
some indescribable way, he has added to the color of 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


175 


life since coming to Alabama Ranch. It’s mostly, I 
think, because he’s supplied me with the one thing I 
had sorely missed, without being quite conscious of it. 
He has been able to give me mental companionship, 
at a time when my mind was starving for an idea or 
two beyond the daily drudgery of farm-work. He has 
given a fillip to existence, loath as I am to acknowl- 
edge it. He’s served to knock the moss off my soul by 
more or less indirectly reminding me that all work and 
no play could make Chaddie McKail a very dull girl 
indeed. 

I was rather afraid, at one time, that he was going 
to spoil it all by making love to me, after the manner 
of young Bud Dyruff, from the Cowen Ranch, who, 
because I waded bare-kneed into a warm little slough- 
end when the horses were having their noonday meal, 
assumed that I could be persuaded to wade with equal 
celerity into indiscriminate affection. That rudimen- 
tary and ingenuous youth, in fact, became more and 
more offensive in his approaches, until finally I turned 
on him. “Are you trying to make love to me?” I de- 
manded. “The surest thing you know,” he said with a 
rather moonish smile. “Then let me tell you some- 
thing,” I hissed out at him, with my nose within six 
inches of his, “I’m a high-strung hell-cat, I am. I’m 
a bob-cat, and I’m not aching to be pawed by you or 
any other hare-brained he-mutt. So now, right from 
this minute, keep your distance ! Is that clear? Keep 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


176 

your distance, or I’ll break your head in with this 
neck-yoke !” 

Poor Bud! That rather blighted the flower of 
Bud’s tender young romance, and to this day he effects 
a wide detour when he happens to meet me on the trail 
or in the byways of Buckhorn. 

But Peter Ketley is not of the Bud Dyruff type. 
He is more complex, and, accordingly, more disturb- 
ing. For I can see admiration in his eye, even though 
he no longer expresses it by word of mouth. And there 
is something tonic to any woman in knowing that a 
man admires her. In my case, in fact, it’s so tonic that 
I’ve ordered some benzoin and cucumber-cream, and 
think a little more about how I’m doing my hair, and 
argue with myself that it’s a woman’s own fault if she 
runs to seed before she’s seen thirty. I may be the 
mother of three children, but I still have a hankering 
after personal power — and that comes to women 
through personal attractiveness, disquieting as it may 
be to have to admit it. We can’t be big strong men 
and conquer through force, but our frivolous little 
bodies can house the triumphant weaknesses which 
make men forget their strength. 


Sunday the Fourteenth 


I’ve had a talk with Peter. It simply had to come, 
for we couldn’t continue to play-act and evade real- 
ities. The time arrived for getting down to brass 
tacks. And even now the brass tacks aren’t as clear- 
cut as I’d like them to be. 

But Peter is not and never was a car-thief. That 
beetle-headed suspicion has passed slowly but surely 
away, like a snow-man confronted by a too affection- 
ate sun. It slipped away from me little by little, and 
began losing its lines, not so much when I found that 
Peter carried a bill-fold and a well-thumbed copy of 
Marius The Epicurecm and walked about in under- 
garments that were expensive enough for a prima 
donna , but more because I found myself face to face 
with a Peter-Panish sort of honorableness that was 
not to be dissembled. So I cornered Peter and put 
him through his paces. 

I began by telling him that I didn’t seem to know 
a great deal about him. 

“The closed makimono,” he cryptically retorted, 
“is the symbol of wisdom.” 

I was ashamed to ask just what that meant, so I 
tried another tack. 


177 


178 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“Folks are thrown pretty intimately together, in 
this frontier life, like worms in a bait-tin. So they 
naturally need to know what they’re tangled up with.” 

Peter, at that, began to look unhappy. 

“Would you mind telling me what brought you to 
this part of the country ?” I asked. 

“Would you mind telling me what brought you to 
this part of the country?” countered Peter. 

“My husband,” I curtly retorted. And that chilled 
him perceptibly. But he saw that I was not to be 
shuttled aside. 

“I was interested,” he explained with a shrug of 
finality, “in the nesting-ground of the Canada goose !” 

“Then you came to the right point,” I promptly 
retorted. “For I am it !” 

But he didn’t smile, as I’d expected him to do. He 
seemed to feel that something approaching serious- 
ness was expected of that talk. 

“I really came because I was more interested in one 
of your earliest settlers,” he went on. “This settler, 
I might add, came to your province some three million 
years ago and is now being exhumed from one of the 
cut-banks of the Red Deer River. He belongs to the 
Mesozoic order of archisaurian gentlemen known as 
Dinosauria , and there’s about a car-load of him. This 
interest in one of your cretaceous dinosaur skeletons 
would imply, of course, that I’m wedded to science. 
And I am, though to nothing else. I’m as free as the 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


179 


wind, dear lady, or I wouldn’t be holidaying here 
with a tractor-plow that makes my legs ache and a 
prairie Penelope, who, for some reason or other, has 
the power of making my heart ache.” 

“Verboten!” I promptly interjected. 

Peter saluted and then sighed. 

“There are things up here even more interesting 
than your Edmonton formation,” he remarked. “But 
I was born a Quaker, you see, and I can’t get rid of 
my self-control!” 

“I like you for that,” I rather depressed him by 
saying. “For I find that one accepts you, Peter, as 
one accepts a climate. You’re intimate in your very 
remoteness.” 

Peter looked at me out of a rueful yet ruminative 
eye. But Whinnie came forth and grimly announced 
that the Twins were going it. So I had to turn 
shackward. 

“You really ought to get that car out,” I called 
over my shoulder to him, with a head-nod toward the 
hay-stack. And he nodded absently back at me. 


Thursday the — I Can't Remember 


Dinky-Dunk rode over to-day when Peter -was bolt- 
ing some new wire stuts on the windmill tower and I 
was busy dry-picking two polygamous old roosters 
which Whinnie had beheaded for me. My husband 
attempted an offhand and happy-go-lucky air which, 
I very soon saw, was merely a mask to hide his 
embarrassment. He even flushed up to the ears when 
little Dinkie drew back for a moment or two, as any 
child might who didn’t recognize his own father, 
though he later solicitously tiptoed to the sleeping- 
porch where the Twins were having their nap, and 
remarked that they were growing prodigiously. 

It was all rather absurd. But when one member 
of this life-partnership business is stiff with con- 
straint, you can’t expect the other member to fall on 
his neck and weep. And Dinky-Dunk, for all his 
nonchalance, looked worried and hollow-eyed. He 
was in the saddle again, and headed back for Casa 
Grande, when he caught sight of Peter at work on 
the windmill. So he loped over to my hired man and 
had a talk with him. What they talked about I 
couldn’t tell, of course, but it seemed a casual and 
friendly enough conversation. Peter in his blue- 
180 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


181 


jeans, dirt-marked and oil-stained, and with a wrench 
in his hand, looked like an I. W. W. agitator who’d 
fallen on evil days. 

I felt tempted to sally forth and reprove Dinky- 
Dunk for wasting the time of my hired help. But 
that, I remembered in time, might be treading on 
rather thin ice, or, what would be even worse, might 
seem like snooping. And speaking of snooping* 
reminds me that a few nights ago I listened carefully 
at the open window of the bunk-house where Whin- 
stane Sandy was deep in repose. Not a sound, not a 
trace of a snore, arose from Whinnie’s cot. 

So my suspicions were confirmed. That old sour- 
dough had deliberately lain awake and tried to trum- 
pet my second man from the precincts which Whinnie 
felt he’d already preempted. He had attempted to 
snore poor Peter off the map and away from Ala- 
bama Ranch ! 


Saturday the Thirtieth 


The sedatest lives, I suppose, have their occasional 
Big Surprises. Life, at any rate, has just treated me 
to one. Lady Alicia Newland’s English maid, known 
as Struthers, arrived at Alabama Ranch yesterday 
afternoon and asked if I’d take her in. She’d had 
some words, she said, with her mistress, and didn’t 
propose to be treated like the scum of the earth by 
anybody. 

So the inevitable has come about. America, the 
liberalizer, has touched the worthy Struthers with 
her wand of democracy and transformed her from a 
silent machine of service into a Vesuvian female with 
a mind and a voice of her own. 

I told Struthers, who was still a bit quavery and 
excited, to sit down and we’d talk the matter over, for 
rustling maids, in a land where they’re as scarce as 
hen’s teeth, is a much graver crime than rustling 
cattle. Yet if Lady Allie had taken my husband away 
from me, I didn’t see why, in the name of poetic jus- 
tice, I shouldn’t appropriate her hand-maid. 

And Struthers, I found, was quite definite as to he? 
intentions. She is an expert needle-woman, can 
do plain cooking, and having been a nurse-maid in 
182 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


183 


Ker younger days, is quite capable of looking after 
children, even American children. I winced at that, 
naturally, and winced still harder when she stipulated 
that she must have four o’clock tea every afternoon, 
and every alternate Sunday morning off for the pur- 
pose of “saging” her hair, which was a new one on 
me. But I weighed the pros and cons, very deliber- 
ately, and discussed her predicament very candidly, 
and the result is that Struthers is now duly installed 
at Alabama Ranch. Already, in fact, that efficient 
hand of hers has left its mark on the shack. Her 
muffins this morning were above reproach and to- 
morrow we’re to have Spotted Dog pudding. But 
already, I notice, she is casting sidelong glances in 
the direction of poor Peter, to whom, this evening at 
supper, she deliberately and unquestionably donated 
the fairest and fluffiest quarter of the lemon pie. I 
have no intention of pumping the lady, but I can see 
that there are certain matters pertaining to Casa 
Grande which she is not averse to easing her mind of. 
I am not quite sure, in fact, that I could find it pos- 
sible to lend an ear to the gossipings of a servant. 
And yet — and yet, there are a few things I’d like to 
find out. And dignity may still be slaughtered on the 
altar of curiosity. 


1 Sunday the Sixth 


Now that I’ve had a breathing-spell, I’ve been sit- 
ting back and mentally taking stock. The showers of 
last week have brought the needed moisture for our 
wheat, which is looking splendid. Our oats are not 
quite so promising, but everything will depend upon 
the season. The season, in fact, holds our fate and 
our fortune in its lap. Those ninety days that include 
June and July and August are the days when the 
northwest farmer is forever on tiptoe watching the 
weather. It’s his time of trial, his period of crisis, 
when our triple foes of Drought and Hail and Fire 
may at any moment creep upon him. It keeps one on 
the qui vive, making life a gamble, giving the zest 
of the uncertain to existence, and leaving no room for 
boredom. It’s the big drama which even dwarfs the 
once momentous emotions of love and hate and jeal- 
ousy. For when the Big Rush is on, I’ve noticed, 
husbands are apt to neglect their wives, and lovers 
forget their sweethearts, and neighbors their enmi- 
ties. Let the world go hang, but before and above 
every tiling else, save your crop! 

Yet, as I was saying, I’ve been taking stock. It’s 
clear that I should have more cattle. And if all goes 
184 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


185 


well, I want a bank-barn, the same as they have in the 
East, with cement flooring and modern stalling. And 
I’ve got to comb over my herd, and get rid of the 
boarders and hatracks, and acquire a blooded bull for 
Alabama Ranch, to improve the strain. Two of my 
milkers must go for beef, as well as several scrub 
springers which it would be false economy to hold. 
I’ve also got to do something about my hogs. They 
are neither “easy feeders” nor good bacon types. 
With them, too, I want a good sire, a pure-bred York- 
shire or Berkshire. And I must have cement troughs 
and some movable fencing, so that my young shoats 
may have pasture-crop. For there is money in pigs, 
and no undue labor, provided you have them prop- 
erly fenced. 

My chickens, which have been pretty well caring 
for themselves, have done as well as could be expected. 
I’ve tried to get early hatchings from my brooders, 
for pullets help out with winter eggs when prices are 
high, laying double what a yearling does during the 
cold months. My yellow-beaks and two-year-olds I 
shall kill off as we’re able to eat them, for an old hen 
is a useless and profitless possession and I begin to 
understand why lordly man has appropriated that 
phrase as a term of contempt for certain of my sex. 
I’m trading in my eggs — and likewise my butter — at 
Buckhorn, selling the Number One grade and holding 
back the Number Twos for home consumption. There 


186 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


is an amazing quantity of Number Twos, because 
of “stolen nests” and the lack of proper coops and 
runs. But we seem to get away with them all. Dinkie 
now loves, them and would eat more than one at a time 
if I’d let him. 

The gluttony of the normal healthy three-year-old 
child, by the way, is something incredible. Dinkie 
reminds me more and more of a robin in cherry-time. 
He stuffs sometimes, until his little tummy is as tight 
as a drum, and I verily believe he could eat his own 
weight in chocolate blanc-mange, if I’d let him. Eat- 
ing, with him, is now a serious business, demanding 
no interruptions or distractions. Once he’s decently 
filled, however, his greediness takes the form of 
exterior application. He then rejoices to plaster as 
much as he can in his hair and ears and on his face, 
until he looks like a cross between a hod-carrier and 
a Fiji-Islander. And grown men, I’ve concluded, are 
very much the same with their appetite of love. They 
come to you with a brave showing of hunger, but 
when you’ve given until no more remains to be given, 
they become finicky and capricious, and lose their 
interest in the homely old porridge-bowl which looked 
all loveliness to them before they had made it 
theirs. 

This afternoon, tired of scheming and conceiting 
for the future, I had a longing to be frivolous and 
care-free. So I got out the old rusty -rimmed banjo. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


187 


tuned her up, and sat on an overturned milk-bucket, 
with Dinkie and Bobs and Poppsy and Pee-Wee for 
an audience. 

I was leaning back with my knees crossed, strum- 
ming out Turkey in the Straw when Peter walked up 
and sat down between Bobs and Dinkie. So I gave 
him The Whistling Coon , while the Twins lay there 
positively pop-eyed with delight, and he joined in 
with me on Dixie , singing in a light and somewhat 
throaty baritone. Then we swung on to There’s a 
Hole in the Bottom of the Sea , which must always be 
sung to a church-tune, and still later to that dolorous 
ballad, Oh, Bury Me Not on the Lone Prair-hee! 
Then we tried a whistling duet with banjo accom- 
paniment, pretty well murdering the Tinker’s Song 
from Robin Hood until Whinstane Sandy, who was 
taking his Sabbath bath in the bunk-house, loudly 
opened the window and stared out with a dourly 
reproving countenance, which said as plain as words: 
“This is nae the day for whustlin’, folks !” 

But little Dinkie, obviously excited by the music, 
shouted “A-more ! A-more !” so we went on, disregard- 
ing Whinnie and the bunk-house window and Struth- 
ers’ acrid stare from the shack-door. I was in the mid- 
dle of Fay Templeton’s lovely old Rosie , You Are My 
Posey , when Lady Alicia rode up, as spick and span 
as though she’d just pranced off Rotten Row. And 
as I’d no intention of showing the white feather to 


188 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


her ladyship, I kept right on to the end. Then I 
looked up and waved the banjo at her where she sat 
stock-still on her mount. There was an enigmatic 
look on her face, but she laughed and waved back, 
whereupon Peter got up, and helped her dismount as 
she threw her reins over the pony’s head. 

I noticed that her eye rested very intently on Peter’s 
face as I introduced him, and he in turn seemed to 
size the stately newcomer up in one of those lightning- 
flash appraisals of his. Then Lady Allie joined our 
circle, and confessed that she’d been homesick for a 
sight of the kiddies, especially Dinkie, whom she took 
on her knee and regarded with an oddly wistful and 
abstracted manner. 

My hired man, I noticed, was in no way intimidated 
by a title in our midst, but wagered that Lady Allie’s 
voice would be a contralto and suggested that we all 
try On the Road to Mandalay together. But Lady 
Allie acknowledged that she had neither a voice nor 
an ear, and would prefer listening. We couldn’t 
remember the words, however, and the song wasn’t 
much of a success. I think the damper came when 
Struthers stepped out into full view, encased in my 
big bungalow-apron of butcher’s linen. Lady Alicia, 
after the manner of the English, saw her without see- 
ing her. There wasn’t the flicker of an eyelash, or a 
moment’s loss of poise. But it seemed too much like 
a Banquo at the feast to go on with our banjo-strum- 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


189 


ming, and I attempted to bridge the hiatus by none 
too gracefully inquiring how things were getting 
along over at Casa Grande. Lady Allie’s contem- 
plative eye, I noticed, searched my face to see if there 
were any secondary significances to that bland inquiry. 

“Everything seems to be going nicely,” she 
acknowledged. Then she rather took the wind out of 
my sails by adding: “But I really came over to see if 
you wouldn’t dine with me to-morrow at seven. Bring 
the children, of course. And if Mr. — er — Ketley can 
come along, it will be even more delightful.” 

Still again I didn’t intend to be stumped by her 
ladyship, so I said that I’d be charmed, without one 
second of hesitation, and Peter, with an assumption of 
vast gravity, agreed to come along if he didn’t have 
to wear a stiff collar and a boiled shirt. And he con- 
tinued to rag Lady Allie in a manner which seemed 
to leave her a little bewildered. But she didn’t alto- 
gether dislike it, I could see, for Peter has the power 
of getting away with that sort of thing. 


Tuesday the Eighth 


Lady Alicia ’s dinner is over and done with. I 
can’t say that it was a howling success. And I’m still 
very much in doubt as to its raison d'etre, as the 
youthful society reporters express it. At first I 
thought it might possibly be to flaunt my lost gran- 
deur in my face. And then I argued with myself 
that it might possibly be to exhibit Sing Lo, the new 
Chink man-servant disinterred from one of the Buck- 
horn laundries. And still later I suspected that it 
might be a sort of demonstration of preparedness, 
like those carefully timed naval parades on the part 
of one of the great powers disquieted by the activities 
of a restive neighbor. And then came still another 
suspicion that it might possibly be a move to precip- 
itate the impalpable, as it were, to put certain family 
relationships to the touch, and make finally certain 
as to how things stood. 

But that, audacious as I felt Lady Alicia to be, 
didn’t quite hold water. It didn’t seem any more rea- 
sonable than my earlier theories. And all I’m really 
certain of is that the dinner was badly cooked and 
badly served, rather reminding me of a chow-house 
190 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


191 


meal on the occasion of a Celestial New Year. We all 
wore our every-day clothes (with Peter’s most care- 
fully pressed and sponged by the intriguing Struthers) 
and the Twins were put asleep up-stairs in their old 
nursery and Dinkie was given a place at the table with 
two sofa-cushions to prop him up in his armchair (and 
acted like a little barbarian) and Peter nearly broke 
his neck to make himself as pleasant as possible, chat- 
tering like a magpie and reminding me of a circus- 
band trying to make the crowd forget the bareback 
rider who’s just been carried out on a stretcher. But 
Constraint was there, all the while, first in the form 
of Dinky-Dunk’s unoccupied chair, which remained 
that way until dinner was two-thirds through, and 
then in the form of Dinky-Dunk himself, whose 
explanation about some tractor-work keeping him late 
didn’t quite ring true. His harried look, I must 
acknowledge, wore away with the evening, but to me 
at least it was only too plain that he was there under 
protest. 

I did my utmost to stick to the hale-fellow-well-met 
role, but it struck me as uncommonly like dancing on 
a coffin. And for all his garrulity, I know, Peter was 
really watching us with the eye of a hawk. 

“I’m too old a dog,” I overheard him telling Lady 
Alicia, “ever to be surprised at the crumbling of an 
ideal or the disclosure of a skeleton.” 

I don’t know what prompted that statement, but it 


192 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


had the effect of making Lady Allie go off into one 
of her purl-two knit-two trances. 

“I think you English people,” I heard him telling 
her a little later, “have a tendency to carry modera- 
tion to excess.” 

“I don’t quite understand that,” she said, lighting 
what must have been about her seventeenth cigarette. 

“I mean you’re all so abnormally normal,” retorted 
Peter — which impressed me as being both clever and 
true. And when Lady Allie, worrying over that 
epigram, became as self-immured as a Belgian milk- 
dog, Peter cocked an eye at me as a robin cocks an 
eye at a fish-worm, and I had the audacity to murmur 
across the table at him, “Lady Barbarina.” Where- 
upon he said back, without batting an eye: “Yes, I 
happen to have read a bit of Llenry James.” 

But dinner came to an end and we had coffee in 
what Lady Alicia had rechristened the Lounge, and 
then made doleful efforts to be light and airy over 
a game of bridge, whereat Dinky-Dunk lost fourteen 
dollars of his hard-earned salary and twice I had to 
borrow six bits from Peter to even up with Lady 
Allie, who was inhospitable enough to remain the 
winner of the evening. And I wasn’t sorry when those 
devastating Twins of mine made their voices heard 
and thrust before me an undebatable excuse for trek- 
king homeward. And another theatricality presented 
itself when Dinky-Dunk announced that he’d take us 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


193 


back in the car. But we had White-Face and Tumble- 
Weed and our sea-going spring-wagon, with plenty 
of rugs, and there was no way, of course, of putting 
a team and rig in the tonneau. So I made my adieux 
and planted Peter meekly in the back seat with little 
Dinkie to hold and took the reins myself. 

I started home with a lump in my throat and a 
weight in my heart, feeling it really wasn’t a home 
that I was driving toward. But it was one of those 
crystal-clear prairie nights when the stars were like 
electric-lights shining through cut-glass and the air 
was like a razor-blade wrapped in panne-velvet. It 
took you out of yourself. It reminded you that you 
were only an infinitely small atom in the immensity of 
a crowded big world, and that even your big world was 
merely a microscopic little mote lost amid its un- 
counted millions of sister-motes in the infinitudes of 
time and space. 

“ Nitchevo !” I said out loud, as I stopped on the 
trail to readjust and wrap the Twins in their rug : 
lined laundry-basket. 

“In that case,” Peter unexpectedly remarked, “Pd 
like to climb into that front seat with you.” 

“Why?” I asked, not greatly interested. 

“Because I want to talk to you,” was Peter’s 
answer. 

“But I think I’d rather not talk,” I told him. 

“Whv ?” it was his turn to inquire. 


19 4 * 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“Isn’t it a rum enough situation as it is?” I de- 
manded. For Peter, naturally, had not used his eyes 
for nothing that night. 

But Peter didn’t wait for my permission to climb 
into the front seat. He plumped himself down beside 
me and sat there with my first-born in his arms and 
one-half of the mangy old buffalo-robe pulled up over 
his knees. 

“I think I’m beginning to see light,” he said, after 
a rather long silence, as we went spanking along the 
prairie-trail with the cold air fanning our faces. 

“I wish I did,” I acknowledged. 

“You’re not very happy, are you?” he ventured, 
in a voice with just the slightest trace of vibrato in it. 

But I didn’t see that anything was to be gained by 
parading my troubles before others. And life, of 
late, had been teaching me to consume my own smoke. 
So I kept silent. 

“Do you like me, Peter?” I suddenly asked. For 
I felt absurdly safe with Peter. He has a heart, I 
know, as clean as an Alpine village, and the very sense 
of his remoteness, as I’d already told him, gives birth 
to a sort of intimacy, like the factory girl who throws 
a kiss to the brakeman on the through freight and 
remains Artemis-on-ice to the delicatessen-youth from 
whom she buys her supper “weenies.” 

“What do you suppose I’ve been hanging around 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


195 


for?” demanded Peter, with what impressed me as an 
absence of finesse. 

“To fix the windmill, of course,” I told him. “Un- 
less you have improper designs on Struthers !” 

He laughed a little and looked up at the Great Bear. 

“If it’s true, as they say, that Fate weaves in the 
dark, I suppose that’s why she weaves so badly,” he 
observed, after a short silence. 

“She undoubtedly drops a stitch now and then,” I 
agreed, wondering if he was thinking of me or 
Struthers when he spoke. “But you do like me, 
don’t you?” 

“I adore you,” admitted Peter quite simply. 

“In the face of all these?” I said with a contented 
little laugh, nodding toward my three children. 

“In the face of everything,” asserted Peter. 

“Then I wish you’d do something for me,” I 
told him. 

“What?” 

“Break that woman’s heart,” I announced, with a 
backward nod of my head toward Casa Grande. 

“I’d much rather break yours” he coolly con- 
tended. “Or I’d prefer knowing I had the power of 
doing it.” 

I shook my head. “It can’t be done, Peter. And 
it can’t even be pretended. Imagine the mother of 
twins trying to flirt with a man even as nice as you 


196 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


are ! It would be as bad as an elephant trying to be 
kittenish and about as absurd as one of your dino- 
sauria getting up and trying to do a two-step. And 
I’m getting old and prosy, Peter, and if I pretend 
to be skittish now and then it’s only to mask the fact 
that I’m on the shelf, that I’ve eaten my pie and that 
before long I’ll be dyeing my hair every other Sunday, 
the same as Struthers, and ” 

“Rot!” interrupted Peter. “All rot!” 

“Why rot?” I demanded. 

“Because to me you’re the embodiment of undying 
youth,” asserted the troubadour beside me. It was 
untrue, and it was improper, but for a moment or two 
at least my hungry heart closed about that speech 
the same as a child’s hand closes about a chocolate- 
drop. Women are made that way. But I had to 
keep to the trail. 

“Supposing we get back to earth,” I suggested. 

“What’s the matter with the way we were head- 
ing?” countered the quiet-eyed Peter. 

“It doesn’t seem quite right,” I argued. And he 
laughed a little wistfully. 

“What difference does it make, so long as we’re 
happy?” he inquired. And I tried to reprove him with 
a look, but I don’t think it quite carried in the misty 
starlight. 

“I can’t say,” I told him, “that I approve of your 
reasoning.” 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


197 


“That’s just the point,” he said with a slightly 
more reckless note in his laughter. “It doesn’t pre- 
tend to be reasoning. It’s more like that abandoning 
of all reasoning which brings us our few earthly 
glories.” 

“ Cogito , ergo sum” I announced, remembering my 
Descartes. 

“Well, I’m going to keep on just the same,” pro- 
tested Peter. 

“Keep on at what?” I asked. 

“At thinking you’re adorable,” was his reply. 

“Well, the caterpillars have been known to stop the 
train, but you must remember that it’s rather hard on 
the caterpillars,” I proclaimed as we swung off the 
trail and headed in for Alabama Ranch. 


Sunday the Thirteenth 


On Friday night there were heavy showers again, 
and now Whinnie reports that our Marquis wheat 
couldn’t look better and ought to run well over forty 
bushels to the acre. We are assured of sufficient 
moisture, but our two enemies yclept Fire and Hail 
remain. I should like to have taken out hail insurance, 
but I haven’t the money on hand. 

I can at least make sure of my fire-guards. Turn- 
ing those essential furrows will be good training for 
Peter. That individual, by the way, has been quieter 
and more ruminative of late, and, if I’m not mistaken, 
a little gentler in his attitude toward me. Yet there’s 
not a trace of pose about him, and I feel sure he 
wouldn’t harm the morals of a lady-bug. He’s kind 
and considerate, and doing his best to be a good pal. 
Whinnie, by the way, regards me with a mildly 
reproving eye, and having apparently concluded that 
I am a renegade, is concentrating his affection on 
Dinkie, for whom he is whittling out a new Noah’s 
Ark in his spare time. He is also teaching Dinkie to 
ride horseback, lifting him up to the back of either 
Nip or Tuck when they come for water and letting 
him ride as far as the stable. He looks very small 
up on that big animal. 


198 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


199 


At night, now that the evenings are so long, 
Whinnie takes my laddie on his knee and tells him 
stories, stories which he can’t possibly understand, 
I’m sure, but Dinkie likes the drone of Whinnie’s 
voice and the feel of those rough old arms about his 
little body. We all hunger for affection. The idiot 
who said that love was the bitters in the cocktail of 
life wasn’t either a good liver or a good philosopher. 
Por love is really the whole cocktail. Take that away, 
and nothing is left. 

I seem to be getting moodier, as summer advances. 
Alternating waves of sourness and tenderness sweep 
through me, and if I wasn’t a busy woman I’d pos- 
sibly make a fine patient for one of those fashionable 
nerve-specialists who don’t flourish on the prairie. 

But I can’t quite succeed in making myself as 
miserable as I feel I ought to be. There seems to 
be a great deal happening all about us, and yet noth- 
ing ever happens. My children are hale and hearty, 
my ranch is fat with its promise of harvest, and I am 
surrounded by people who love and respect me. But 
it doesn’t seem enough. Coiled in my heart is one 
small disturbing viper which I can neither scotch nor 
kill. Yet I decline to be the victim of anything as 
ugly as jealousy. For jealousy is both poisonous 
and pathetic. But I’d like to choke that woman ! 

Yesterday Lady Alicia, who is now driving her own 
car, picked up Peter from his fire-guard work and 


200 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


carried him off on an experimental ride to see what 
was wrong with her carbureter — the same old car- 
bureter! She let him out at the shack, on her way 
home, and Struthers witnessed the tail end of that 
enlevement . It spoilt her day for her. She fumed 
and fretted and made things fly — for Struthers 
always works hardest, I’ve noticed, when in a temper 
— and surrendering to the corroding tides which were 
turning her gentle nature into gall and wormwood, 
obliquely and tremulously warned the somewhat 
startled Peter against ungodly and frivolous females 
who ’ave no right to be corrupting simple-minded 
colonials and who ’ave no scruples against playing 
with men the same as a cat would play with a mouse. 

“So be warned in time,” I sternly exclaimed to 
Peter, when I accidentally overheard the latter end 
of Struthers’ exhortation. 

“And there are others as ought to be warned in 
time!” was Struthers’ Parthian arrow as she flounced 
off to turn the omelette which she’d left to scorch on 
the cook-stove. 

Peter’s eye met mine, but neither of us said any- 
thing. It reminded me of cowboy honor, which 
prompts a rider never to “touch leather,” no matter 
how his bronco may be bucking. And omelette y I was 
later reminded, comes from the French cilumelle, which 
means ship’s plating, a bit of etymology well authen- 
ticated by Struthers’ skillet. 


Wednesday the Twenty -third 

Summer is here, here in earnest, and already we’ve 
had a few scorching days. Haying will soon be upon 
us, and there is no slackening in the wheels of indus- 
try about Alabama Ranch. My Little Alarm-Clocks 
have me up bright and early, and the morning prairie 
is a joy that never grows old to the eye. Life is good, 
and I intend to be happy, for 

I’m going alone, 

Though Hell forefend, 

By a way of my own 
To the bitter end! 

And our miseries, after all, are mostly in our own 
minds. Yesterday I came across little Dinkie lament- 
ing audibly over a scratch on his hand at least seven 
days old. He insisted that I should kiss it, and, after 
witnessing that healing touch, was perfectly satisfied. 
And there’s no reason why grown-ups should be more 
childish than children themselves. 

One thing that I’ve been missing this year, more 
than ever before, is fresh fruit. During the last few 
days I’ve nursed a craving for a tart Northern-Spy 
apple, or a Golden Pippin with a water-core, or a 
juicy and buttery Bartlett pear fresh from the tree. 
SOI 


202 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


Those longings come over me occasionally, like my 
periodic hunger for the Great Lakes and the Atlantic, 
a vague ache for just one vision of tumbling beryl 
water, for the plunge of cool green waves and the 
race of foam. And Peter overheard me lamenting our 
lack of fruit and proclaiming I could eat my way 
right across the Niagara Peninsula in peach time. 
So when he came back from Buckhorn this afternoon 
with the farm supplies, he brought on his own hook 
two small boxes of California plums and a whole crate 
of oranges. 

It was very kind of him, and also very foolish, for 
the oranges will never keep in this hot weather, and 
the only way that I can see to save them is to make 
them up into marmalade. It was pathetic to see little 
Dinkie with his first orange. It was hard to persuade 
him that it wasn’t a new kind of ball. But once 
the flavor of its interior juices was made known to 
him, he took to it like a cat to cream. 

It brought home to me how many things there are 
my kiddies have had to do without, how much that 
is a commonplace to the city child must remain beyond 
the reach of the prairie tot. But I’m not complain- 
ing. I am resolved to be happy, and in my prophetic 
bones is a feeling that things are about to take a turn 
for the better, something better than the humble 
stewed prune for Dinkie’s little tummy and something 
better than the companionship of the hired help for 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


203 


his mother. Not that both Peter and Whinnie haven’t 
a warm place in my heart! They couldn’t be better 
to me. But I’m one of those neck-or-nothing women, 
I suppose, who are silly enough to bank all on a 
single throw, who have to put all their eggs of affec- 
tion in one basket. I can’t be indiscriminate, like Din- 
kie, for instance, whom I found the other day kissing 
every picture of a man in the Mail-Order Catalogue 
and murmuring “Da-da !” and doing the same to every 
woman-picture and saying “Mummy.” To be lavish 
with love is, I suppose, the prerogative of youth. Age 
teaches us to treasure it and sustain it, to guard it 
as we’d guard a lonely flame against the winds of 
the world. But the flame goes out, and we grope on 
through the darkness wondering why there can never 
be another. . . . 

I wonder if Lady Alicia is as cold as she seems? 
For she has the appearance of keeping her emotions 
in an ice-box of indifferency, the same as city florists 
keep their flowers chilled for commercial purposes. 
Lady Allie, I’m sure, is fond of my little Dinkie. Yet 
there’s a note of condescension in her affection, for 
even in what seems like an impulse of adoration her 
exclamation nearly always is “Oh, you lovable little 
rabbit!” or, if not that, it’s likely to be “You ador- 
able little donkey you !” She says it very prettily, of 
course, setting it to music almost with that melodious 
English drawl of hers. She is, she must be, a very 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


204 

fascinating woman. But at the first tee, friendship 
ends, as the golf-nuts say. 

. . . I asked Peter the other day what He 

regarded as my besetting sin and the brute replied: 
“Topping the box.” I told him I didn’t quite get the 
idea. “A passion to produce a good impression,” he 
explained, “by putting all your biggest mental straw- 
berries on the top !” 

“That sounds suspiciously like trying to be a Smart 
Aleck,” I retorted. 

“It may sound that way, but it isn’t. You’re so 
mentally alive, I mean, that you’ve simply got to be 
slightly acrobatic. And it’s as natural, of course, as 
a child’s dancing.” 

But Peter is wrong. I’ve been out of the world 
so long that I’ve a dread of impressing people as 
stupid, as being a clodhopper. And if trying hard 
not to be thought that is “topping the box,” I sup- 
pose I’m guilty. 

“You are also not without vanity,” Peter judi- 
cially continued. “But every naturally beautiful 
woman has a right to that.” And I proved Peter’s 
contention by turning shell-pink even under my sun- 
burn and feeling a warm little runway of pleasure 
creep up through my carcass, for the homeliest old 
prairie-hen that ever made a pinto shy, I suppose, 
loves to be told that she’s beautiful. 

Peter, of course, is a conscienceless liar, but I can’t 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


205 


help liking him, and he’ll always nest warm in the 
ashes of my heart. . . . 

There’s one thing I must do, as soon as I have the 
chance, and that is get in to a dentist and have my 
teeth attended to. And now that I’m so much thinner 
I want a new and respectable pair of corsets. I’ve 
been studying my face in the glass, and I can see, 
now, what an awful Ananias Peter really is. Struthers, 
by the way, observed me in the midst of that inspec- 
tion, and, if I’m not greatly mistaken, indulged in a 
sniff. To her, I suppose, I’m one of those vain 
creatures who fall in love with themselves as a child 
and perpetuate, thereby, a life romance ! 


Saturday the Twenty-siccth 


Coming events do not cast their shadows before 
them. I was busy in the kitchen this morning, making 
marmalade out of what was left of Peter’s oranges 
and contentedly humming 0h> Dry Those Tears when 
the earthquake that shook the world from under my 
feet occurred. 

The Twins had been bathed and powdered and fed 
and put out in their sleeping-box, and Dinkie was 
having his morning nap, and Struthers was busy at 
the sewing-machine, finishing up the little summer 
shirts for Poppsy and Pee-Wee which Pd begun to 
make out of their daddy’s discarded B. V. D.’s. It 
was a glorious morning with a high-arching pale 
blue sky and little baby-lamb cloudlets along the sky- 
line and the milk of life running warm and rich in 
the bosom of the sleeping earth. And I was bustling 
about in my apron of butcher’s linen, after slicing 
oranges on my little maple-wood carving-slab until 
the house was aromatic with them, when the sound 
of a racing car-engine smote on my ear. I went to 
the door with fire in my eye and the long-handled pre- 
serving spoon in my hand, ready to call down destruc- 
tion on the pinhead who’d dare to wake my kiddies. 

206 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


207 

My visitor, I saw, was Lady Alicia; and I beheld 
my broken wash-tub under the front axle of her 
motor-car. 

I went out to her, with indignation still in my eye, 
but she paid no attention to either that or the tub 
itself. She was quite pale, in fact, as she stepped 
down from her driving-seat, glanced at her buck- 
skin gauntlets, and then looked up at me. 

“There’s something we may as well face, and face 
at once,” she said, with less of a drawl than usual. 

I waited, without speaking, wondering if she was 
referring to the tub. But I could feel my heart con- 
tract, like a leg-muscle with a cramp in it. And we 
stood there, face to face, under the flat prairie sun- 
light, ridiculously like two cockerels silently estimat- 
ing each other’s intentions. 

“I’m in love with your husband,” Lady Alicia sud- 
denly announced, with a bell-like note of challenge in 
her voice. “And I’d rather like to know what you’re 
going to do about it.” 

I was able to laugh a little, though the sound of 
it seemed foolish in my own startled ears. 

“That’s rather a coincidence, isn’t it?” I blithely 
admitted. “For so am I.” 

I could see the Scotch-granite look that came into 
the thick-lashed tourmaline eyes. And they’d be 
lovely eyes, I had to admit, if they were only a little 
softer. 


'208 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“That’s unfortunate,” was her ladyship’s curt 
retort. 

“It’s more than unfortunate,” I agreed, “it’s ex- 
tremely awkward.” 

“Why?” she snapped, plainly annoyed at my light- 
ness of tone. 

“Because he can’t possibly have both of us, you 
know — unless he’s willing to migrate over to that 
Mormon colony at Red-Deer. And even there, I 
understand, they’re not doing it now.” 

“I’m afraid this is something much too serious to 
joke about,” Lady Alicia informed me. 

“But it strikes me as essentially humorous,” I 
told her. 

“I’m afraid,” she countered, “that it’s apt to prove 
essentially tragic.” 

“But he happens to be my husband,” I observed. 

“Only in form, I fancy, if he cares for some one 
else,” was her ladyship’s deliberate reply. 

“Then he has acknowledged that — that you’ve cap- 
tured him?” I inquired, slowly but surely awakening 
to the sheer audacity of the lady in the buckskin 
gauntlets. 

“Isn’t that rather — er — primitive?” inquired Lady 
Allie, paler than ever. 

“If you mean coming and squabbling over another 
woman’s husband, I’d call it distinctly prehistoric,” 
I said with a dangerous little red light dancing before 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


209 

my eyes. “It’s so original that it’s aboriginal. But 
I’m still at a loss to know just what your motive is, 
or what you want.” 

“I want an end to this intolerable situation,” my 
visitor averred. 

“Intolerable to whom?” I inquired. 

“To me, to Duncan, and to you , if you are the 
right sort of woman,” was Lady Alicia’s retort. And 
still again I was impressed by the colossal egoism of 
the woman confronting me, the woman ready to ride 
rough-shod over the world, for all her sparkling 
veneer of civilization, as long as she might reach her 
own selfish ends. 

“Since you mention Duncan, I’d like to ask if 
you’re speaking now as his cousin, or as his mistress ?” 

Lady Alicia’s stare locked with mine. She was 
making a sacrificial effort, I could see, to remain calm. 

“I’m speaking as some one who is slightly inter- 
ested in his happiness, and his future,” was her coldly 
intoned reply. 

“And has my husband acknowledged that his hap- 
piness and his future remain in your hands?” I asked. 

“I should hate to see him waste his life in a hole 
like this,” said Lady Alicia, not quite answering my 
question. 

“Have you brought any great improvement to it?” 
I parried. Yet even as I spoke I stood impressed by 
the thought that it was, after all, more than primitive. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


210 

It was paleolithic, two prehistoric she-things in com- 
bat for their cave-man. 

“That is not what I came here to discuss,” she 
replied, with a tug at one of her gauntlets. 

“I suppose it would be nearer the mark to say, since 
you began by being so plain-spoken, that you came 
here to ask me to give you my husband,” I retorted 
as quietly as I could, not because I preferred the soft 
pedal, but because I nursed a strong suspicion that 
Struthers’ attentive ear was just below the nearest 
window-sill. 

Lady Alicia smiled forbearingly, almost pityingly. 

“Any such donation, I’m afraid, is no longer your 
prerogative,” she languidly remarked, once more mis- 
tress of herself. “What I’m more interested in is 
your giving your husband his liberty.” 

I felt like saying that this was precisely what I 
had been giving him. But it left too wide an opening. 
So I ventured, instead: “I’ve never heard my husband 
express a desire for his liberty.” 

“He’s too honorable for that,” remarked my enemy. 

“Then it’s an odd kind of honor,” I icily remarked, 
“that allows you to come here and bicker over a situa- 
tion that is so distinctly personal.” 

“Pardon me, but I’m not bickering. And I’m not 
rising to any heights of courage which would be 
impossible to your husband. It’s consoling, however, 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


211 


to know how matters stand. And Duncan will proba- 
bly act according to his own inclinations.” 

That declaration would have been more inflam- 
matory, I think, if one small truth hadn’t gradually 
come home to me. In some way, and for some reason, 
Lady Alicia Elizabeth Newland was not so sure of 
herself as she was pretending to be. She was not so 
sure of her position, I began to see, or she would 
never have thrown restraint to the winds and come 
to me on any such mission. 

“Then that counts me out !” I remarked, with a for- 
lorn attempt at being facetious. “If he’s going to do 
as he likes, I don’t see that you or I have much to say 
in the matter. But before he does finally place his 
happiness in your hands, I rather think I’d like to 
have a talk with him.” 

“That remains with Duncan, of course,” she admit- 
ted, in a strictly qualified tone of triumph, as though 
she were secretly worrying over a conquest too incredi- 
bly facile. 

“He knows, of course, that you came to talk this 
over with me?” I suggested, as though it were an 
after-thought. 

“He had nothing to do with my coming,” asserted 
Lady Alicia. 

“Then it was your own idea?” I asked. 

“Entirely,” she admitted. 


212 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“Then what did you hope to gain?” I demanded. 

“I wasn’t considering my own feelings,” imperially 
acknowledged her ladyship. 

“That was very noble of you,” I admitted, “espe- 
cially when you bear in mind that you weren’t con- 
sidering mine, either ! And what’s more, Lady New- 
land, I may as well tell you right here, and right now, 
that you can’t get anything out of it. I gave up my 
home to you, the home I’d helped make by the work of 
my own hands. And I gave up the hope of bringing 
up my children as they ought to be brought up. I 
even gave up my dignity and my happiness, in the 
hope that things could be made to come out straight. 
But I’m not going to give up my husband. Remem- 
ber that, I’m not going to give him up. I don’t care 
what he says or feels, at this particular moment ; I’m 
not going to give him up to make a mess of what’s 
left of the rest of his life. He may not know what’s 
ahead of him, but 1 do! And now that you’ve shown 
me just what you are, and just what you’re ready to 
do, I intend to take a hand in this. I intend to fight 
you to the last ditch, and to the last drop of the hat ! 
And if that sounds primitive, as you’ve already sug- 
gested, it’ll pay you to remember that you’re out here 
in a primitive country where we’re apt to do our fight- 
ing in a mighty primitive way 1” 

It was a very grand speech, but it would have been 
more impressive, I think, if I hadn’t been suddenly 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


SIS 


startled by a glimpse of Whinstane Sandy’s rock- 
ribbed face peering from the bunk-house window at 
almost the same moment that I distinctly saw the tip 
of Struthers’ sage-green coiffure above the nearest 
sill of the shack. And it would have been a grander 
speech if I’d stood quite sure as to precisely what it 
meant and what I intended to do. Yet it seemed suf- 
ficiently climactic for my visitor, who, after a queenly 
and combative stare into what must have looked like 
an ecstatically excited Eourth-of-July face, turned 
imperially about and swung open the door of her 
motor-car. Then she stepped up to the car-seat, as 
slowly and deliberately as a sovereign stepping up to 
her throne. 

“It may not be so simple as it seems,” she announced 
with great dignity, as she proceeded to start her car. 
And the same dignity might have attended her entire 
departure, but in the excitement she apparently 
flooded her carbureter, and the starter refused to work, 
and she pushed and spun and re-throttled and pushed 
until she was quite red in the face. And when the 
car finally did get under way, the running-gear became 
slightly involved with my broken wash-tub and it was 
not until the latter was completely and ruthlessly 
demolished that the automobile found its right-of-way 
undisputed and anything like dignity returned to the 
situation. 

I stood there, with the long-handled preserving 


214 ? 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


spoon still in my hand, staring after Lady Alicia and 
the dust that arose from her car-wheels. I stood there 
in a sort of trance, with all the valor gone out of my 
bones and that foolish declamation of mine still ring- 
ing in my ears. 

I began to think of all the clever things I might 
have said to Lady Alicia Elizabeth Newland. But 
the more I thought it over the more desolated I became 
in spirit, so that by the time I meandered back to the 
shack I had a face as long as a fiddle. And there 
I was confronted by a bristling and voluble Struthers, 
who acknowledged that she’d heard what she’d heard, 
and could no longer keep her lips sealed, whether it 
was her place to speak or not, and that her ladyship 
was not all that she ought to be, not by any manner 
of means, or she would never have left England and 
hidden herself away in this wilderness of a colony. 

I had been rather preoccupied with my own 
thoughts, and paying scant attention to the clatter- 
ing-tongued Struthers, up to this point. But the 
intimation that Lady Allie was not in the West for 
the sake of her health brought me up short. And 
Struthers, when I challenged that statement, promptly 
announced that the lady in question was no more in 
search of health than a tom-cat’s in search of water 
and no more interested in ranching than an ox is inter- 
ested in astronomy, seeing as she’d ’a’ been co-respond- 
ent in the Allerby and Crewe-Buller divorce case if 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


215 


*she’d stayed where the law could have laid a hand on 
her, and standing more shamed than ever when Baron 
Crewe-Buller shut himself up in his shooting-lodge 
and blew his brains out three weeks before her lady- 
ship had sailed for America, and the papers that full 
of the scandal it made it unpleasant for a self-respect- 
ing lady’s maid to meet her friends of a morning in 
Finsbury Park. And as for these newer goings-on, 
Struthers had seen what was happening right under 
her nose, she had, long before she had the chance to 
say so openly by word of mouth, but now that the fat 
was in the fire she wasn’t the kind to sit by and see 
those she should be loyal to led about by the nose. 
And so forth. And so forth! For just what else the 
irate Struthers had to unload from her turbulent 
breast I never did know, since at that opportune 
moment Dinkie awakened and proceeded to page his 
parent with all the strength of his impatient young 
lungs. 

By the time I’d attended to Dinkie and finished my 
sadly neglected marmalade — for humans must eat, 
whatever happens — I’d made an effort to get some 
sort of order back into my shattered world. Yet it 
was about Duncan more than any one else that my 
thoughts kept clustering and centering. He seemed, 
at the moment, oddly beyond either pity or blame. 
I thought of him as a victim of his own weakness, 
as the prey of a predaceous and unscrupulous woman 


21 6 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


who had intrigued and would continue to intrigue 
against his happiness, a woman away from her own 
world, a self-complacent and sensual privateer who 
for a passing whim, for a momentary appeasement of 
her exile, stood ready to sacrifice the last of his self- 
respect. She was self-complacent, but she was also 
a woman with an unmistakable physical appeal. She 
was undeniably attractive, as far as appearances went, 
and added to that attractiveness was a dangerous im- 
mediacy of attack, a touch of outlawry, which only too 
often wins before resistance can be organized. And 
Dinky-Dunk, I kept reminding myself, was at that 
dangerous mid-channel period of a man’s life where 
youth and age commingle, where the monotonous mid- 
dle-years slip their shackles over his shoulders and 
remind him that his days of dalliance are ebbing away. 
He awakens to the fact that romance is being left 
behind, that the amorous adventure which once meant 
so much to him must soon belong to the past, that 
he must settle down to his jog-trot of family life. 
It’s the age, I suppose, when any spirited man is 
tempted to kick up with a good-by convulsion or two 
of romantic adventure, as blind as it is brief and pas- 
sionate, sadly like the contortions of a rooster with 
its head cut off. 

I tried, as I sat down and struggled to think things 
out, to withhold all blame and bitterness. Then I 
tried to think of life without Dinky-Dunk. I attempted 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


217 

to picture my daily existence with somebody else in 
the place that my Diddums had once filled. But I 
couldn’t do it. I couldn’t forget the old days. I 
couldn’t forget the wide path of life that we’d traveled 
together, and that he was the father of my children 
— my children who will always need him! — and that 
he and he alone had been my torch-bearer into the 
tangled wilderness of passion. 

Then I tried to think of life alone, of going soli- 
tary through the rest of my days — and I knew that 
my Maker had left me too warm-blooded and too 
dependent on the companionship of a mate ever to 
turn back to single harness. I couldn’t live without 
a man. He might be a sorry mix-up of good and bad, 
but I, the Eternal Female, would crave him as a mate. 
Most women, I knew, were averse to acknowledging 
such things; but life has compelled me to be candid 
with myself. The tragic part of it all seems that 
there should and could be only one man. I had been 
right when I had only too carelessly called myself a 
neck-or-nothing woman. 

It wasn’t until later that any definite thought of 
injustice to me at Hinky-Dunk’s hands entered my 
head, since my attitude toward Dinky-Dunk seemed 
to remain oddly maternal, the attitude of the mother 
intent on extenuating her own. I even wrung a 
ghostly sort of consolation out of remembering that 
it was not a young and dewy girl who had imposed 


£18 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


herself on his romantic imagination, for youth and 
innocence and chivalric obligation would have brought 
a much more dangerous fire to fight. But Lady Alicia, 
with all her carefully achieved charm, could scarcely 
lay claim to either youth or the other thing. Early 
in the morning, I knew, those level dissecting eyes of 
hers would look hard, and before her hair was up she’d 
look a little faded, and there’d be moments of stress 
and strain when her naively insolent drawl would jar 
on the nerves, like the talk of a spoiled child too intent 
on holding the attention of a visitor averse to pre- 
cocity. And her disdain of the practical would degen- 
erate into untidiness, and her clinging-ivyness, if it 
clung too much, would probably remind a man in his 
reactionary moments of ennui that there are subtler 
pursuits than being a wall, even though it’s a sus- 
taining wall. 

And somewhere in her make-up was a strain of 
cruelty or she would never have come to me the way 
she did, and struck at me with an open claw. That 
cruelty, quite naturally, could never have been paraded 
before my poor old Dinky-Dunk’s eyes. It would be, 
later on, after disillusionment and boredom. Then, 
and then only, it would dare to show its ugly head. 
So instead of feeling sorry for myself, I began to 
feel sorry for my Diddums, even though he was trying 
to switch me off like an electric-light. And all of a 
sudden I came to a decision. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


219 


I decided to write to Dinky-Dunk. That, I felt, 
would be safer than trying to see him. For in a letter 
I could say what I wanted to without being stopped 
or side-tracked. There would be no danger of accusa- 
tions and recriminations, of anger leading to extremes, 
of injured pride standing in the path of honesty. It 
would be better than talking. And what was more, 
, it could be done at once, for the mysterious impression 
that time was precious, that something ominous was in 
the air, had taken hold of me. 

So I wrote to Dinky-Dunk. I did it on two crazy- 
looking pages torn out of the back of his old ranch 
ledger. I did it without giving much thought to 
precisely what I said or exactly how I phrased it, 
depending on my heart more than my brain to guide 
me in the way I should go. For I knew, in the marrow 
of my bones, that it was my last shot, my forlornest 
ultimatum, since in it went packed the last shred of 
my pride. 

“Dear Dinky-Dunk,” I wrote, “I hardly know how 
to begin, but I surely don’t need to begin by saying 
w r e haven’t been hitting it off very well of late. We 
seem to have made rather a mess of things, and I sup- 
pose it’s partly my fault, and the fault of that stupid 
pride which keeps us tongue-tied when we should be 
honest and open with each other. But I’ve been feel- 
ing lately that we’re both skirting a cut-bank with 
our eyes blindfolded, and I’ve faced an incident, trivial 


220 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


in itself but momentous in its possibilities, which per- 
suades me that things can’t go on as they are. There’s 
too much at stake to let either ruffled nerves or false 
modesty — or whatever you want to call it — come be- 
tween you and the very unhappy woman who still is 
your wife. It’s time, I think, when we both ought to 
look everything squarely in the face, for, after all, 
we’ve only one life to live, and if you’re happy, at this 
moment, if you’re completely and tranquilly happy 
as I write this, then I’ve banked wrong, tragically 
wrong, on what I thought you were. For I have 
banked on you, Dinky-Dunk, banked about all my 
life and happiness — and it’s too late to change, even 
if I wanted to. I’m alone in the world, and in a lonely 
part of the world, with three small children to look 
after, and that as much as anything, I suppose, drives 
me to plain speaking and compels me to clear think- 
ing. But even as I write these words to you, I realize 
that it isn’t really a matter of thought or speech. 
It’s a matter of feeling. And the one thing I feel 
is that I need you and want you; that no one, that 
nothing, can ever take your place. ... I thought 
I could write a great deal more. But I find I can’t. 
I seem to have said everything. It is everything, 
really. For I love you, Dinky-Dunk, more than 
everything in life. Perhaps I haven’t shown it 
very much, of late, but it’s there, trying to hide 
its silly old ostrich-head behind a pebble of hurt 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


221 

pride. So let’s turn the page and start over. Let’s 
start with a clean slate, before we lose the chance. 
Come back to me. I’m very unhappy. I find it hard 
to write. It’s only that big ache in my heart that 
allows me to write at all. And I’ve left a lot of things 
unsaid, that I ought to have said, and intended to say, 
but this will have to be enough. If there’s nothing 
that speaks up to you, from between these lines, then 
there’s nothing that can hold together, I’m afraid, 
what’s left of your life and mine. Think this over, 
Dinky-Eunk, and answer the way your heart dictates. 
But please don’t keep me waiting too long, for until 
I get that answer I’ll be like a hen on a hot griddle or 
Mary Queen of Scots on the morning before she lost 
her head, if that’s more dignified.” ■ 

The hardest part of all that letter, I found, was the 
ending of it. It took me a long time to decide just 
what to sign myself, just how to pilot my pen between 
the rocks of candor and dignity. So I ended up by 
signing it “Chaddie” and nothing more, for already 
the fires of emotion had cooled and a perplexed little 
reaction of indifferency had set in. It was only a sur- 
face-stir, but it was those surface-stirs, I remembered, 
which played such a lamentably important part in 
life. 

When Whinstane Sandy came in at noon for his 
dinner, a full quarter of an hour ahead of Peter, I 
had his meal all ready for him by the time he had 


222 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


watered and fed his team. I cut that meal short, in 
fact, by handing him my carefully sealed letter and 
telling him I wanted him to take it straight over to 
Casa Grande. 

I knew by his face as I helped him hitch Water- 
Light to the buckboard — for Whinnie’s foot makes it 
hard for him to ride horseback — that he nursed a 
pretty respectable inkling of the situation. He offered 
no comments, and he even seemed averse to having his 
eye meet mine, but he obviously knew what he knew. 

He was off with a rattle of wheels and a drift of 
trail-dust even before Peter and his cool amending eyes 
arrived at the shack to “stoke up” as he expresses it. 
I tried to make Peter believe that nothing was wrong, 
and cavorted about with Bobs, and was able to laugh 
when Dinkie got some of the new marmalade in his 
hair, and explained how we’d have to take our mower- 
knives over to Teetzel’s to have them ground, and did 
my best to direct silent reproofs at the tight-lipped 
and tragic-eyed Struthers, who moved about like a 
head-mourner not unconscious of her family obliga- 
tions. But Peter, I suspect, sniffed something un- 
toward in the air, for after a long study of my face — 
which made me color a little, in spite of myself — he 
became about as abstracted and solemn-eyed as Struth- 
ers herself. 

To my dying day I shall never forget that wait for 
Whinnie to come back. It threatened to become an 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


223 

endless one. I felt like Bluebeard’s wife up in the 
watch tower — no, it was her Sister Anne, wasn’t it, 
who anxiously mounted the tower to search for the 
first sign of deliverance? At any rate I felt like Luck- 
now before the Relief, or a prisoner waiting for the 
jury to file in, or a gambler standing over an invisi- 
ble roulette-table and his last throw, wondering into 
what groove the little ivory ball was to run. And 
when Whinnie finally appeared his seamed old face 
wore such a look of dour satisfaction that for a weak 
flutter or two of the heart I thought he’d brought 
Dinky-Dunk straight back with him. 

But that hope didn’t live long. 

“Your maun’s awa’,” said Whinnie, with quite un- 
necessary curtness, as he held my own letter out to me. 

“He’s away?” I echoed in a voice that was just a 
wee bit trembly, as I took the note from Whinnie, 
“what do you mean by away?” 

“He left three hours ago for Chicago,” Whinstane 
Sandy retorted, still with that grim look of triumph 
in his gloomy old eyes. 

“But what could be taking him to Chicago?” I 
rather weakly inquired. 

“ ’Twas to see about buyin’ some blooded stock for 
the ranch. At least, so her ladyship informed me. 
But that’s nae more than one of her lies, I’m thinkin’.” 

“What did she say, Whinnie?” I demanded, doing 
my best to keep cool. 


224 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“Naethin 5 ,” was Whinnie’s grim retort. “ ’Twas 
me did the sayin’!” 

“What did you say?” I asked, disturbed by the 
none too gentle look on his face. 

“What was needed to be said,” that old sour-dough 
with the lack-luster eyes quietly informed me. 

“What did you say?” I repeated, with a quavery 
feeling just under my floating ribs, alarmed at the 
after-light of audacity that still rested on his face, 
like wine-glow on a rocky mountain-tip. 

“I said,” Whinstane Sandy informed me with his old 
shoulders thrust back and his stubby forefinger 
pointed to within a few inches of my nose, “I said 
that I kenned her and her kind well, havin’ watched 
the likes o’ her ridden out o’ Dawson City on a rail 
more times than once. I said that she was naethin’ 
but a wanton” — only this was not the word Whinnie 
used — “a wanton o’ Babylon and a temptress o’ men 
and a corrupter o’ homes out o’ her time and place, 
bein’ naught but a soft shinin’ thing that was a mock- 
ery to the guid God who made her and a blight to the 
face o’ the open prairie that she was foulin’ with her 
presence. I said that she’d brought shame and sor- 
row to a home that had been filled with happiness until 
she crept into it like the serpent o’ hell she was, and 
seein’ she’d come into a lonely land where the people 
have the trick o’ tryin’ their own cases after their own 
way and takin’ when need be justice into their own 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


225 

hands, she’d have one week, one week o’ seven days and 
no more, to gather up what belonged to her and take 
herself back to the cities o’ shame where she’d find 
more o’ her kind. And if she was not disposed to 
hearken a friendly and timely word such as I was 
givin’ her, I said, she’d see herself taken out o’ her 
home, and her hoorish body stripped to the skin, and 
then tarred and feathered, and ridden on the cap-rail 
of a corral-gate out of a settlement that had small 
taste for her company !” 

“Whinnie!” I gasped, sitting down out of sheer 
weakness, “you didn’t say that?” 

“I said it,” was Whinnie’s laconic retort. 

“But what right had you to — ” 

He cut me short with a grunt that was almost dis- 
respectful. 

“I not only said it,” he triumphantly affirmed, “but 
what’s more to my likin’, I made her believe it, leavin’ 
her with the mockin’ laugh dead in her eyes and her 
face as white as yon table-cover, white to the lips!” 


Sunday the Twenty-seventh 


I’ve been just a little mystified, to-day, by Whin- 
stane Sandy’s movements. As soon as breakfast was 
over and his chores were done he was off on the trail. 
I kept my eye on him as he went, to satisfy myself 
that he was not heading for Casa Grande, where no 
good could possibly come of his visitations. 

For I’ve been most emphatic to Whinstane Sandy 
in the matter of his delightful little lynch-law pro- 
gram. There shall be no tarring and feathering of 
women by any man in my employ. That may have 
been possible in the Klondike in the days of the gold- 
rush, but it’s not possible in this country and this day 
of grace — except in the movies. And life is not so 
simple that you can ride its problems away on the 
cap-rail from a corral. It’s unfortunate that that ab- 
surd old sour-dough, for all his good intentions, ever 
got in touch with Lady Alicia. I have, in fact, 
strictly forbidden him to repeat his visit to Casa 
Grande, under any circumstances. 

But a number of things combine to persuade me that 
he’s not being as passive as he pretends. He’s even 
sufficiently forgotten his earlier hostility toward Peter 
to engage in long and guarded conversation with that 
226 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


m 


gentleman, as the two of them made a pretense of 
bolting the new anchor-timbers to the heel of the wind- 
mill tower. So at supper to-night I summoned up 
sufficient courage to ask Peter what he knew about the 
situation. 

He replied that he knew more than he wanted to, 
and more than he relished. That reply proving emi- 
nently unsatisfactory, I further inquired what he 
thought of Lady Alicia. He somewhat startled and 
shocked me by retorting that according to his own 
personal way of thinking she ought to be spanked 
until she glowed. 

I was disappointed in Peter about this. I had al- 
ways thought of him as on a higher plane than poor 
old Whinnie. But he was equally atavistic, once 
prejudice had taken possession of him, for what he 
suggested must be regarded as not one whit more re- 
fined than tar and feathers. As for myself, I’d like 
to choke her, only I haven’t the moral courage to ad- 
mit it to anybody. 


Thursday the First 


Lady Adicia has announced, I learn through a 
Struthers quite pop-eyed with indignation, that it’s 
Peter and I who possibly ought to be tarred and 
feathered, if our puritanical community is deciding to 
go in for that sort of thing! It is to laugh. 

Her ladyship, I also learn, has purchased about all 
the small-arms ammunition in Buckhorn and toted the 
same back to Casa Grande in her car. There, in un- 
obstructed view of the passers-by, she has set up a 
target, on which, by the hour together, she coolly and 
patiently practises sharpshooting with both rifle and 
revolver. 

I admire that woman’s spunk. And whatever you 
may do, you can’t succeed in bullying the English. 
They have too much of the bull-dog breed in their 
bones. They’re always at their best, Peter declares, 
when they’re fighting. “But from an Englishwoman 
trying to be kittenish,” he fervently added, “good 
Lord, deliver us all !” 

And that started us talking about the English. 
Peter, of course, is too tolerant to despise his cousins 
across the Pond, but he pregnantly reminded me that 
Lady Allie had asked> him what sort of town Sas- 
228 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


229 


katchewan was and he had retorted by inquiring if she 
was fond of Yonkers, whereupon she’d looked puzzled 
and acknowledged that she’d never eaten one. Eor 
Peter and Lady Allie, it seems, had had a set-to about 
American map-names, which her ladyship had de- 
scribed as both silly and unsayable, especially the 
Indian ones, while Peter had grimly proclaimed that 
any people who called Seven-Oaks Snooks and Bel- 
voir Beever and Ruthven Rivven and Wrottesley Roxly 
and Marylebone Marrabun and Wrensfordsley 
Wrensley had no right to kick about American pro- 
nunciations. 

But Peter is stimulating, even though he does stim- 
ulate you into opposition. So I found myself defend- 
ing the English, and especially the Englishman, for 
too many of them had made me happy in their lovely 
old homes and too many of their sons, asons and seons 
ago, had tried to hold my hand. 

“Your Englishman,” I proclaimed to Peter, “al- 
ways acts as though he quite disapproves of you and 
yet he’ll go to any amount of trouble to do things to 
make you happy or comfortable. Then he conceals 
his graciousness by being curt about it. Then, when 
he’s at his crankiest, he’s apt to startle you by saying 
the divinest things point-blank in your face, and as 
likely as not, after treating you £is he would a rather 
backward child of whom he rigidly disapproves, he’ll 
make love to you and do it with a fine old Anglo-Saxon 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


230 

directness. He hates swank, of course, for he’s si 
truffle-hound who prefers digging out his own deli- 
cacies. And it’s ten to one, if a woman simply sits 
tight and listens close and says nothing, that he’ll say 
something about her unrivaled powers of conversa- 
tion !” 


Sunday the Fourth 


Peter, as we sat out beside the corral on an empty 
packing-case to-night after supper, said that civiliza- 
tion was a curse. “Look what it’s doing to your noble 
Red Man right here in your midst ! There was a time, 
when a brave died, they handsomely killed that dead 
brave’s favorite horse, feeling he would course the 
plains of Heaven in peace. Now, I find, they have 
their doubts, and they pick out a dying old bone-yard 
whose day is over, or an outlaw that nobody can break 
and ride. And form without faith is a mockery. It’s 
the same with us whites. Here we are, us two, with — ” 

But I stopped Peter. I had no wish to slide on 
rubber-ice just for the sake of seeing it bend. 

“Can you imagine anything lovelier,” I remarked 
as a derailer, “than the prairie at this time of the year, 
and this time of day?” 

Peter followed my eye out over the undulating and 
uncounted acres of sage-green grain with an eternity 
of opal light behind them. 

“Think of LaVerendrye, who was their Columbus,” 
he meditated aloud. “Going on and on, day by day, 
week by week, wondering what was beyond that world 
231 


232 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


of plain and slough and coulee and everlasting green ! 
And they tell me there’s four hundred million arable 
acres of it. I wonder if old Verendrye ever had an 
inkling of what Whittier felt later on: 

‘I hear the tread of pioneers, 

Of cities yet to be — 

The first low wash of waves where soon 
Shall roll a human sea.’ ” 

Then Peter went on to say that Bryant had given 
him an entirely false idea of the prairie, since from the 
Bryant poem he’d expected to see grass up to his arm- 
pits. And he’d been disappointed, too, by the scarcity 
of birds and flowers. 

But I couldn’t let that complaint go by unchal- 
lenged. I told him of our range-lilies and foxglove 
and buffalo-beans and yellow crowfoot and wild sun- 
flowers and prairie-roses and crocuses and even violets 
in some sections. “And the prairie-grasses, Peter — 
don’t forget the prairie-grasses,” I concluded, per- 
plexed for a moment by the rather grim smile that 
crept up into his rather solemn old Peter-Panish face. 

“I’m not likely to,” he remarked. 

For to-morrow, I remembered, Peter is going off to 
cut hay. He has been speaking of it as going into the 
wilderness for meditation. But what he’s really doing 
is taking a team and his tent and supplies and staying 
with that hay until it’s cut, cut and “ collected to use 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


the word which the naive Lady Allie introduced into 
these parts. 

I have a suspicion that it is the wagging of tongues 
that’s sending Peter out into his wilderness. But I’ve 
been busy getting his grub-box ready and I can at 
least see that he fares well. For whatever happens, 
we must have hay. And before long, since we’re to go 
in more and more for live stock, we must have a silo 
at Alabama Ranch. Now that the open range is a 
thing of the past, in this part of the country at least, 
the silo is the natural solution of the cattle-feed prob- 
lem. It means we can double our stock, which is rather 
like getting another farm for nothing, especially as 
the peas and oats we can grow for ensilage purposes 
give such enormous yields on this soil of ours. 


Tuesday the Sixth 

For the second time the unexpected has happened. 
Lady Alicia has gone. She’s off, bag and baggage, 
and has left the redoubtable Sing Lo in charge of 
Casa Grande. 

Her ladyship waited until one full day after the 
time-limit imposed upon her by Whinstane Sandy in 
that barbarous armistice of his, and then, having saved 
her face, joined the Broadhursts of Montreal on a 
trip to Banff, where she’ll be more in touch with her 
kind and her countrymen. From there, I understand, 
she intends visiting the Marquis of Anglesey ranch at 
Wallachie. 

I don’t know what she intends doing about her 
property, but it seems to me it doesn’t show any great 
interest in either her crop or her cousin, to decamp 
at this particular time. Struthers protests that she’s 
a born gambler, and can’t live without bridge and 
American poker. Banff, accordingly, ought to give 
her what she’s pining for. 

But I’m too busy to worry about Lady Allie. The 
Big Drama of the year is opening on this sun-steeped 
plain of plenty, for harvest-time will soon be here and 

£34 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


235 


we’ve got to be ready for it. We’re on the go from 
six in the morning until sun-down. We’re bringing 
in Peter’s crop of hay with the tractor, hauling three 
wagon-loads at a time. I make the double trip, get- 
ting back just in time to feed my babies and then 
hiking out again. That means we’re all hitting on 
every cylinder. I’ve no time for either worries or 
wishes, though Peter once remarked that life is only 
as deep as its desires, and that the measure of our 
existence lies in the extent of its wants. That may be 
true, in a way, but I haven’t time to philosophize over 
it. Plard work can be more than a narcotic. It’s 
almost an anesthetic. And soil, I’ve been thinking, 
should be the symbol of life here, as it is with the 
peasants of Poland. I feel that I’m getting thinner, 
but I’ve an appetite that I’m ashamed of, in secret. 

Dinky-Dunk, by the way, is not back yet, and 
there’s been no word from him. Struthers is resolute 
in her belief that he’s in hiding somewhere about the 
mountain-slopes of Banff. But I am just as resolute 
in my scorn for all such suspicions. And yet, and yet, 
— if I wasn’t so busy I’d be tempted to hold solemn 
days of feasting and supplication that Lady Alicia 
Elizabeth Newland might wade out beyond her depth 
in the pellucid waters of Lake Louise. 


Friday the Sixteenth 


Peter surprised me yesterday by going in to Buck- 
horn and bringing out a machinist to work on the 
windmill tower. By mid-afternoon they had it ready 
for hoisting and rebolting to its new anchor-posts. 
So just before supper the team and the block-and- 
tackle were hitched on to that attenuated steel skeleton, 
Whinnie took one guide rope and I took the other, 
and our little Eiffel Tower slowly lifted itself up into 
the sky. 

Peter, when it was all over, and the last nut tight- 
ened up, walked about with the triumphant smile of 
a Master-Builder who beholds his work completed. 
So I said “Hello, Hcdvard Solness /” as I stepped over 
to where he stood. 

And he was bright enough to catch it on the wing, 
for he quoted back to me, still staring up at the tower- 
head: “From this day forward I will be a free builder.” 

Whereupon I carelessly retorted, “Oh, there’s some 
parts of Ibsen that I despise.” 

But something in Peter’s tone and his preoccupa- 
tion during supper both worried and perplexed me. 
So as soon as I could get away from the shack I went 
23 6 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


237 


out to the windmill tower again. And the small plat- 
form at the end of the sloping little iron ladder looked 
so tempting and high above the world that I started 
up the galvanized rungs. 

When I was half-way up I stopped and looked 
down. It made me dizzy, for prairie life gives you 
few chances of getting above the flat floor of your 
flat old world. But I was determined to conquer that 
feeling, and by keeping my eyes turned up toward the 
windmill head I was able to reach the little platform 
at the top and sit there with my feet hanging o.ver 
and my right arm linked through one of the steel 
standards. 

I suppose, as windmills go, it wasn’t so miraculously 
high, but it was amazing how e^en that moderate alti- 
tude where I found myself could alter one’s view-point. 
I felt like a sailor in a crow’s-nest, like a sentinel on 
a watch-tower, like an eagle poised giddily above the 
world. And such a wonderful and wide-flung world it 
was, spreading out beneath me in mottled patches of 
grape-leaf green and yellow and gold, with a burgun- 
dian riot of color along the western sky-line where the 
last orange rind of the sun had just slipped down out 
of sight. 

As I stared down at the roof of our shack it looked 
small and pitiful, tragically meager to house the tan- 
gled human destinies it was housing. And the fields 
where we’d labored and sweated took on a foreign and 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


238 

ghostly coloring, as though they were oblongs on the 
face of an alien world, a world with mystery and 
beauty and unfathomable pathos about it. 

I was sitting there, with my heels swinging out in 
space and an oddly consoling sense of calmness in my 
heart, when Peter came out of the shack and started 
to cross toward the corral. I couldn’t resist the temp- 
tation to toss my old straw hat down at him. 

He stopped short as it fell within twenty paces of 
him, like a meteor out of the sky. Then he turned and 
stared up at me. The next minute I saw him knock 
out his little briar pipe, put it away in his pocket, and 
cross over to the tower. 

I could feel the small vibrations of the steel struc- 
ture on which I sat poised, as he mounted the ladder 
toward me. And it felt for all the world like sitting on 
the brink of Heaven, like a blessed damozel the second, 
watching a sister-soul coming up to join you in your 
beatitude. 

“I say, isn’t this taking a chance?” asked Peter, 
a little worried and a little out of breath, as he clam- 
bered up beside me. 

“It’s glorious!” I retorted, with a nod toward the 
slowly paling sky-line. 

That far and lonely horizon looked as though a fire 
of molten gold burned behind the thinnest of mauve 
and saffron and purple curtains, a fire that was too 
subdued to be actual flame, but more an unearthly 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


239 


and ethereal radiance, luring the vision on and on 
until it brought an odd little sense of desolation to 
the heart and made me glad to remember that Peter 
was swinging his lanky legs there at my side out over 
empty space. 

“I find,” he observed, “that this tower was sold to 
a tenderfoot, by the foot. That’s why it went over. 
It was too highfalutin ! It was thirty feet taller than 
it had any need to be.” 

Then he dropped back into silence. 

I finally became conscious of the fact that Peter, 
instead of staring at the sunset, was staring at me. 
And I remembered that my hair was half down, trail- 
ing across my nose, and that three distinctly new 
freckles had show r n themselves that week on the bridge 
of that same nose. 

“0 God, but you’re lovely !” he said in a half-smoth- 
ered and shamefaced sort of whisper. 

“ Verboten /” I reminded him. “And not so much 
the cussing, Peter, as the useless compliments.” 

He said nothing to that, but once more sat staring 
out over the twilight prairie for quite a long time. 
When he spoke again it w T as in a quieter and much 
more serious tone. 

“I suppose I may as well tell you,” he said without 
looking at me, “that I’ve come into a pretty clear 
understanding of the situation here at Alabama 
Ranch.” 


240 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“It’s kind of a mix-up, isn’t it?” I suggested, withi 
an attempt at lightness. 

Peter nodded his head. 

“I’ve been wondering how long you’re going to 
wait,” he observed, apparently as much to himself as 
to me. 

“Wait for what?” I inquired. 

“For what you call your mix-up to untangle,” was 
his answer. 

“There’s nothing for me to do but to wait,” I re- 
minded him. 

He shook his head in dissent. 

“You can’t waste your life, you know, doing that,” 
he quietly protested. 

“What else can I do ?” I asked, disturbed a little by 
the absence of color from his face, apparent even in 
that uncertain light. 

“Nothing’s suggested itself, I suppose?” he ven- 
tured, after a silence. 

“Nothing that prompts me into any immediate ac- 
tion,” I told him. “You see, Peter, I’m rather an- 
chored by three little hostages down in that little shack 
there !” 

That left him silent for another long and brooding 
minute or two. 

“I suppose you’ve wondered,” he finally said, “why 
I’ve stuck around here as long as I have?” 

I nodded, not caring to trust myself to words, and 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


241 


then, realizing I was doing the wrong thing, I shook 
my head. 

“It’s because, from the morning you found me in 
that mud-hole, I’ve just wanted to be near you, to 
hear your voice when you spoke, to see the curve of 
your lips and the light come and go in your eyes when 
you laugh,” were the words that came ever so slowly 
from Peter. “I’ve wanted that so much that I’ve let 
about everything else in life go hang. Yet in a 
way, and in my own world, I’m a man of some 
little importance. I’ve been cursed with enough 
money, of course, to move about as I wish, and 
loaf as I like. But that sort of life isn’t really 
living. I’m not in the habit, though, of wanting 
the things I can’t have. So what strikes me as 
the tragic part of it all is that I couldn’t have met and 
known you when you were as free as I am now. In a 
way, you are free, or you ought to be. You’re a 
woman, I think, with arrears of life to make up. 
You’ve struck me, from the very first, as too alive, too 
sensitive, too responsive to things, to get the fullest 
measure out of life by remaining here on the prairie,, 
in what are, after all, really pioneer conditions. 
You’ve known the other kind of life, as well as I have, 
and it will always be calling to you. And if that call 
means anything to you, and the — the change we’ve 
spoken of is on its way, or for some unexpected rea- 
son has to come, I’m — well, I’m going to take the bit 


242 THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 

in my teeth right here and tell you that I love you 
more than you imagine and a good deal more, I sup- 
pose, than the law allows !” 

He pushed my hand aside when I held it up to stop 
him. 

“I may as well say it, for this is as good a time and 
place as we’ll ever have, and I can’t go around with 
my teeth shut on the truth any longer. I know you’ve 
got your three little tots down there, and I love ’em 
about as much as }^ou do. And it would seem like 
giving a little meaning and purpose to life to know 
that I had the chance of doing what I could to make 
you and to make them happy. I’ve — ” 

But I couldn’t let him go on. 

“It’s no use, Peter,” I cried with a little choke in 
my voice which I couldn’t control. “It’s no earthly 
use. I’ve known you liked me, and it’s given me a 
warm little feeling down in one corner of my heart. 
But I could never allow it to be more than a corner. 
I like you, Peter, and I like you a lot. You’re won- 
derful. In some ways you’re the most adorable man 
I’ve ever known in all my life. That’s a dangerous 
thing to say, but it’s the truth and I may as well say 
it. It even hurts a little to remember that I’ve traded 
on your chivalry, though that’s the one thing in life 
you can trade on without reproof or demand for re- 
payment. But as I told you before, I’m one of those 
neck-or-nothing women, one of those single-track 


( THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


243 


women, who can’t have their tides of traffic going two 
ways at once. And if I’m in a mix-up, or a maelstrom, 
or whatever you want to call it, I’m in it. That’s 
where I belong. It would never, never do to drag an 
innocent outsider into that mixed-up mess of life, 
simply because I imagined it could make me a little 
more comfortable to have him there.” 

Peter sat thinking over what I’d said. There were 
no heroics, no chest-pounding, no suggestion of ro- 
mantically blighted lives and broken hearts. 

“That means, of course, that I’ll have to climb out,” 
Peter finally and very prosaically remarked. 

“Why?” I asked. 

“Because it’s so apt to leave one of us sailing 
under false colors,” was his somewhat oblique way of 
explaining the situation. “I might have hung on until 
something happened, I suppose, if I hadn’t shown my 
hand. And I hadn’t quite the right to show my hand, 
when you take everything into consideration. But 
you can’t always do what you intend to. And life’s 
a little bigger than deportment, anyway, so what’s 
the use of fussing over it? There’s just one thing, 
though, I want to say, before we pull down the shut- 
ters again. I want you to feel that if anything does 
happen, if by any mischance things should take a 
turn for the worse, or you’re worried in any way about 
the outcome of all this” — he indulged in a quiet but 
comprehensive hand-wave which embraced the entire 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


244 

ranch that lay in the gray light at our feet — “I want 
you to feel that I’d be mighty happy to think you’d 
turn to me for — for help.” 

It was getting just a little too serious again, I felt, 
and I decided in a bit of a panic to pilot things back 
to shallower water. 

“But you have helped, Peter,” I protested. “Look 
at all that hay you cut, and the windmill here, and the 
orange marmalade that’ll make me think of you every 
morning !” 

He leaned a little closer and regarded me with a 
quiet and wistful eye. But I refused to look at him. 

“That’s nothing to what I’d like to do, if you gave 
me the chance,” he observed, settling back against 
the tower-standard again. 

“I know, Peter,” I told him. “And it’s nice of you 
to say it. But the nicest thing of all is your prodig- 
ious unselfishness, the unselfishness that’s leaving this 
talk of ours kind of — well, kind of hallowed, and some- 
thing we’ll not be unhappy in remembering, when it 
could have so easily turned into something selfishly 
mean and ugly and sordid. That’s where you’re 
big. And that’s what I’ll always love you for !” 

“Let’s go down,” said Peter, all of a sudden. “It’s 
getting cold.” 

I sat staring down at the world to which we had to 
return. It seemed a long way off. And the ladder 
that led down to it seemed a cobwebby and uncertain 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


245 


path for a lady whose heart was still slipping a beat 
now and then. Peter apparently read the perplexity 
on my face. 

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll go down one rung 
ahead of you. Even if you did slip, then, I’ll be there 
to hold you up. Come on.” 

We started down, with honest old Peter’s long arms 
clinging to the ladder on either side of me and my 
feet following his, step by step, as we went like a new- t 
fangled sort of quadruped down the narrow steel 
rungs. 

We were within thirty feet of the ground when I 
made ever so slight a misstep and brought Peter up 
short. The next moment he’d caught me up bodily in 
his right arm, and to steady myself I let my arms slip 
about Iris neck. I held on there, tight, even after I 
knew what I was doing, and let my cheek rest against 
the bristly side of his head as we went slowly down to 
the bottom of the tower. 

It wasn’t necessary, my holding my arms about 
Peter’s neck. It wasn’t any more necessary than it 
was for him to pick me up and carry me the rest of 
the way down. It wasn’t true-to-the-line fair play, 
even, when you come to think of it in cold blood, and it 
wasn’t by any manner of means just what sedately 
married ladies should do. 

But, if the terrible truth must be told, it was nice. 
I think both our hearts were a little hungry for the 


246 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


love which didn’t happen to be coming our way, which 
the law of man and his Maker alike prohibited. So 
we saved our dignity and our self-respect, oddly 
enough, by resorting to the shallowest of subterfuges. 
And I don’t care much if it wasn’t true-to-the-line 
ethics. I liked the feel of Peter’s arm around me, 
holding me that way, and I hope he liked that long 
and semi-respectable hug I gave him, and that now 
and then, later on, in the emptier days of his life, he’ll 
remember it pleasantly, and without a bit of bitter- 
ness in his heart. 

For Alabama Ranch, of course, is going to lose 
Peter as soon as he can get away. 


Tuesday the Twenty-fourth 


Peter is no longer with us. He went yesterday, 
much to the open grief of an adoring and heart-broken 
Struthers. I stood in the doorway as he drove off, pre- 
tending to mop my eyes with my hankie and then mak- 
ing a show of wringing the brine out of it. Pie 
laughed at this bit of play-acting, but it was rather 
a melancholy laugh. Struthers, however, was quite 
snappy for the rest of the morning, having appar- 
ently construed my innocent pantomime as a burlesque 
of her tendency to sniffle a little. 

I never quite knew how much we’d miss Peter until 
he was gone, and gone for good. Even Dinkie was 
strangely moody and downcast, and showed his de- 
pression by a waywardness of spirit which reached 
its crowning misdemeanor by poking a bean into his 
ear. 

This seemed a trivial enough incident, at first. But 
the heat and moisture of that little pocket of flesh 
caused the bean to swell, and soon had Dinkie crying 
with pain. So I renewed my efforts to get that bean 
out of the child’s ear, for by this time he was really 
suffering. But I didn’t succeed. There was no way 
247 


248 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


of getting behind it, or getting a hold on it* And 
poor Dinkie bawled bitterly, ignorant of why this 
pain should be inflicted on him and outraged that his 
own mother should add to it by probing about the al- 
ready swollen side of his head. 

I was, in fact, getting a bit panicky, and specu- 
lating on how long it would take to get Dinkie in to 
Buckhorn and a doctor, when Struthers remembered 
about a pair of toilet tweezers she’d once possessed 
herself of, for pulling out an over-punctual gray-hair 
or two. Even then I had to resort to heroic measures, 
tying the screaming child’s hands tight to his side with 
a bath-towel and having the tremulous Struthers hold 
his poor little head flat against the kitchen table. 

It was about as painful, I suppose, as extracting 
a tooth, but I finally got a grip on that swollen legume 
and pulled it from its inflamed pocket of flesh. I felt 
as relieved and triumphant as an obstetrician after a 
hard case, and meekly handed over to Dinkie anything 
his Royal Highness desired, even to his fifth cookie 
and the entire contents of my sewing-basket, which 
under ordinary circumstances is strictly taboo. But 
once the ear-passage was clear the pain went away, 
and Dinkie, at the end of a couple of hours, was him- 
self again. 

But Peter has left a hole in our lives. I keep feel- 
ing that he’s merely out on the land and will be coming 
in with that quiet and remote smile of his and talk- 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


249 


ing like mad through a meal that I always had an in- 
centive for making a little more tempting than the 
ordinary grub-rustling of a clodhopper. 

The only person about Alabama Ranch who seems 
undisturbed by Peter’s departure is Whinstane Sandy. 
He reminds me of a decrepit but robustious old rooster 
repossessing himself of a chicken-run after the de- 
capitation of an arrogant and envied rival. He has 
with a dour sort of blitheness connected up the wind- 
mill pump, in his spare time, and run a pipe in 
through the kitchen wall and rigged up a sink, out of 
a galvanized pig-trough. It may not be lovely to the 
eye, but it will save many a step about this shack of 
ours. And the steps count, now that the season’s work 
is breaking over us like a J ersey surf ! 


Thursday the Twenty-siccth 


I’ve got Struthers in jumpers, and she’s learning 
how to handle a team. Whinnie laughed at her legs, 
and said they made him think a-muckle o’ a heron. 
But men are scarce in this section, and it looks as 
though Alabama Ranch was going to have a real 
wheat crop. Whinnie boasts that we’re three weeks 
ahead of Casa Grande, which, they tell me, is taking 
on a neglected look. 

I’ve had no message from my Dinky-Dunk, and no 
news of him. All day long, at the back of my brain, 
a nervous little mouse of anxiety keeps nibbling and 
nibbling away. Last night, when she was helping me 
get the Twins ready for bed, Struthers confided to 
me that she felt sure Lady Alicia and my husband 
had been playmates together in England at one time, 
for she’s heard them talking and laughing about 
things that had happened long ago. But it’s not the 
things that happened long ago that are worrying me. 
It’s the things that may be happening now. 

I wonder what the fair Lady Alicia intends doing 
about getting her crop off. Sing Lo will scarcely be 
the man to master that problem. . . .The Lord 

knows I’m busy enough, but I seem to be eternally 

250 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


251 


waiting for something. I wonder if every woman’s 
life has a larval period like this? I’ve my children and 
Bobs. Over my heart, all day long, should flow a 
deep and steady current of love. But it’s not the kind 
I’ve a craving for. There’s something missing. I’ve 
been wondering if Dinky-Dunk, even though he were 
here at my side, would still find any “kick” in my 
kisses. I can’t understand why he never revealed to 
me the fact that he and Lady Allie were playmates 
as children. In that case, she must be considerably 
older than she looks. But old or young, I wish she’d 
stayed in England with her croquet and pat-tennis 
and broom-stick-cricket, instead of coming out here 
and majestically announcing that nothing was to be 
expected of a country which had no railway porters ! 


Wednesday the First 


The departed Peter has sent back to us a Victrola 
and a neatly packed box of records. Surely that was 
kind of him. I suppose he felt that I needed some- 
thing more than a banjo to keep my melodious soul 
alive. He may be right, for sometimes during these 
long and hot and tiring days I feel as though my 
spirit had been vitrified and macadamized. But I 
haven’t yet had time to unpack the music-box and get 
it in working-order, though I’ve had a look through 
the records. There are quite a number of my old 
favorites. I notice among them a song from The 
Bohemian Girl. It bears the title of Then You'll 
Remember Me. Poor old Peter! For when I play it, 
I know I’ll always be thinking of another man. 




Sunday the Fifth 


Life is a club from which Cupid can never be black- 
balled. I notice that Strothers, who seems intent on 
the capture of a soul-mate, has taken to darning 
Whinstane Sandy’s socks for him. And Whinnie, 
who is a bit of a cobbler as well as being a bit of rene- 
gade to the ranks of the misogynists, has put new 
heels and soles on the number sevens which Struthers 
wears at the extremities of her heron-like limbs. Thus 
romance, beginning at the metatarsus, slowly but 
surely ascends to the diastolic region ! 


253 


Wednesday the Eighth 


I’ve just had a nice little note from Peter, written 
from the Aldine Club in Philadelphia, saying he’d 
neglected to mention something which had been on 
his mind for some time. He has a slightly rundown 
place in the suburbs of Pasadena, he went on to 
explain, and as his lazy summer would mean he’djhave 
to remain in the East and be an ink-coolie all winter, 
the place was at my disposal if it so turned out that 
a winter in California seemed desirable for me and 
my kiddies. It would, in fact, be a God-send — so he 
protested — to have somebody dependable lodged in 
that empty house, to keep the cobwebs out of the cor- 
ners and the mildew off his books and save the whole 
disintegrating shebang from the general rack and 
ruin which usually overtakes empty mansions of that 
type. He gave me the name and address of the care- 
taker, on Euclid Avenue, and concluded by saying it 
wasn’t very much of a place, but might be endured 
for a winter for the sake of the climate, if I happened 
to be looking for a sunnier corner of the world than 
Alabama Ranch. He further announced that he’d 
give an arm to see little Dinkie’s face when that young 
254 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


255 


outlaw stole his first ripe orange from the big Valencia 
tree in the patio. And Peter, in a post-script, averred 
that he could vouch for the flavor of the aforemen- 
tioned Valencias. 


Tuesday the Fourteenth 


Whinstane Sandy about the middle of last week 
brought home the startling information that Sing Lo 
had sold Lady Allie’s heavy work-team to Bud 
O’Malley for the paltry sum of sixty dollars. He 
further reported that Sing Lo had decamped, taking 
with him as rich a haul as he could carry. 

I was in doubt on what to do, for a while. But I 
eventually decided to go in to Buckhorn and send a 
telegram to the owner of Casa Grande. I felt sure, 
if Lady Allie was in Banff, that she’d be at the 
C. P. It. hotel there, and that even if she had gone on 
to the Anglesey Ranch my telegram would be for- 
warded to Wallachie. So I wired her: “Chinaman 
left in charge has been selling ranch property. Advise 
me what action you wish taken.” 

A two-day wait brought no reply to this, so I then 
telegraphed to the hotel-manager asking for informa- 
tion as to her ladyship. I was anxious for that 
information, I’ll confess, for more personal reasons 
than those arising out of the activities of Sing Lo. 

When I went in for my house supplies on Friday 
there was a message there from the Banff hotel- 
manager stating that Lady Newland had left, ten days 
256 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


257 


before, for the Empress Hotel in Victoria. So I 
promptly wired that hotel, only to learn that my titled 
wanderer might be found in San Francisco, at the 
Hotel St. Francis. So I repeated my message; and 
yesterday morning Hy Teetzel, homeward bound from 
Buckhom in his tin Lizzie, brought the long-expected 
reply out to me. It read: 

“Would advise consulting my ranch manager on 
the matter mentioned in your wire,” and was signed 
“Alicia Newland.” 

There was a sense of satisfaction in having located 
the lady, but there was a distinctly nettling note in 
the tenor of that little message. I decided, accord- 
ingly, to give her the retort courteous by wiring back 
to her: “Kindly advise me of ranch manager’s pres- 
ent whereabouts,” and at the bottom of that message 
inscribed, “Mrs. Duncan Argyll McKail.” 

And I’ve been smiling a little at the telegram which 
has just been sent on to me, for now that I come to 
review our electric intercourse in a cooler frame of 
mind it looks suspiciously like back-biting over a thou- 
sand miles of telegraph-wire. This second message 
from San Francisco said: “Have no knowledge what- 
ever of the gentleman’s movements or whereabouts.” 

It was, I found, both a pleasant and a puzzling bit 
of information, and my earlier regrets at wasting time 
that I could ill spare betrayed a tendency to evaporate. 
It was satisfying, and yet it was not satisfying, for 


258 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


morose little doubts as to the veracity of tbe lady in 
question kept creeping back into my mind. It also 
left everything pretty much up in the air, so I’ve 
decided to take things in my own hand and go to Casa 
Grande and look things over. 


Thursday the Sixteenth 


I didn’t go over to Casa Grande, after all. For 
this morning the news came to me that Duncan had 
been back since day before yesterday. And he is 
undoubtedly doing anything that needs to be done. 

But the lady lied, after all. That fact now is only 
too apparent. And her equerry has been hurried back 
to look after her harried estate. The live stock, I hear, 
went without water for three whole days, and the poul- 
try would all have been in kingdom-come if Sing Lo, 
in choosing a few choice birds for his private con- 
sumption, hadn’t happened to leave the run-door 
unlatched. 

I was foolish enough to expect, of course, that 
Duncan might nurse some slight curiosity as to his 
family and its welfare. This will be his third day 
back, and he has neither put in an appearance nor 
sent a word. Pie’s busy, of course, with that tangle 
to unravel — but where there’s a will there’s usually a 
way. And hope dies hard. Yet day by day I find 
less bitterness in my heart. Those earlier hot tides 
of resentment have been succeeded, not by tranquillity 
or even indifference, but by a colder and more judicial 
259 


$60 THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 

attitude toward things in general. I’ve got a home 
and a family to fight for — not to mention a baby with 
prickly-heat — and they must not be forgotten. I 
have the consolation, too, of knowing that the fight 
doesn’t promise to be a losing one. I’ve banked on 
wheat, and old Mother Earth is not going to betray 
me. My grain has ripened miraculously during these 
last few weeks of hot dry weather. It’s too hot, in fact, 
for my harvest threatens to come on with a rush. But 
we’ll scramble through it, in some way. 


Sunday the Nineteenth 


It’s only three days since I wrote those last lines. 
But it seems a long time back to last Thursday. So 
many, many things have happened since then. 

Friday morning broke very hot, and without a 
breath of wind. By noon it was stifling. By mid- 
afternoon I felt strangely tired, and even more 
strangely depressed. I even attempted to shake my- 
self together, arguing that my condition was purely 
mental, for I had remembered that it was unmistak- 
ably Frida} 7 , a day of ill-omen to the superstitious. 

I was surprised, between four and five, to see Whin- 
stane Sandy come in from his w T ork and busy himself 
about the stables. When I asked him the reason for 
this premature withdrawal he pointed toward a low 
and meek-looking bank of clouds just above the south- 
west sky-line and announced that we were going to 
have a “blow,” as he called it. 

I was inclined to doubt this, for the sun was still 
shining, there was no trace of a breeze, and the sky 
straight over my head was a pellucid pale azure. But, 
when I came to notice it, there was an unusual, small 
stir among my chickens, the cattle were restless, and 
261 


262 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


one would occasionally hold its nose high in the air 
and then indulge in a lowing sound. Even Bobs 
moved peevishly from place to place, plainly disturbed 
by more than the flies and the heat. I had a feeling, 
myself, of not being able to get enough air into my 
lungs, a depressed and disturbed feeling which was 
nothing more than the barometer of my body trying 
to tell me that the glass was falling, and falling 
forebodingly. 

By this time I could see Whinnie’s cloud-bank ris- 
ing higher above the horizon and becoming more 
ragged as it mushroomed into anvil-shaped turrets. 
Then a sigh or two of hot air, hotter even than the 
air about us, disturbed the quietness and made the 
level floor of my yellowing wheat undulate a little, 
like a breast that has taken a quiet breath or two. 
Then faint and far-off came a sound like the leisurely 
firing of big guns, becoming quicker and louder as 
the ragged arch of the storm crept over the sun and 
marched down on us with strange twistings and writh- 
ings and up-boilings of its tawny mane. 

“Ye’d best be makin’ things ready !” Whinnie called 
out to me. But even before I had my windows down 
little eddies of dust were circling about the shack. 
Then came a long and sucking sigh of wind, followed 
by a hot calm too horrible to be endured, a hot calm 
from the stifling center of which your spirit cried 
out for whatever was destined to happen to happen 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


263 


at once. The next moment brought its answer to that 
foolish prayer, a whining and whistling of wind that 
shook our little shell of a house on its foundations, a 
lurid flash or two, and then the tumult of the storm 
itself. 

The room where I stood with my children grew sud- 
denly and uncannily dark. I could hear Struthers 
calling thinly from the kitchen door to Whinnie, who 
apparently was making a belated effort to get my 
chicken-run gate open and my fowls under cover. I 
could hear a scattering drive of big rain-drops on the 
roof, solemn and soft, like the fall of plump frogs. 
But by the time Whinnie was in through the kitchen 
door this had changed. It had changed into a pas- 
sionate and pulsing beat of rain, whipped and lashed 
by the wind that shook the timbers about us. The 
air, however, was cooler by this time, and it was easier 
to breathe. So I found it hard to understand why 
Whinnie, as he stood in the half-light by one of the 
windows, should wear such a look of protest on his 
morose old face which was the color of a pigskin sad- 
dle just under the stirrup-flap. 

Even when I heard one solitary thump on the roof 
over my head, as distinct as the thump of a hammer, 
I failed to understand what was worrying my hired 
man. Then, after a momentary pause in the rain, the 
thumps were repeated. They were repeated in a rat- 
tle which became a clatter and soon grew into one 


264 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


continuous stream of sound, like a thousand machine- 
guns all going off at once. 

I realized then what it meant, what it was. It was 
hail. And it meant that we were being “hailed out.” 

We were being cannonaded with shrapnel from the 
skies. We were being deluged with blocks of ice 
almost the size of duck-eggs. So thunderous was the 
noise that I had no remembrance when the window- 
panes on the west side of the house were broken. It 
wasn’t, in fact, until I beheld the w r ind and water blow- 
ing in through the broken sashes that I awakened to 
what had happened. But I did nothing to stop the 
flood. I merely sat there with my two babes in my 
arms and my Dinkie pressed in close between my 
knees, in a foolishly crouching and uncomfortable 
position, as though I wanted to shield their tender 
little bodies with my own. I remember seeing 
Struthers run gabbing and screaming about the room 
and then try to bury herself under her mattress, like 
the silly old she-ostrich she was, with her number 
sevens sticking out f rom under the bedding. I remem- 
ber seeing Whinnie picking up one of the white things 
that had rolled in through the broken window. It was 
oblong, and about as big as a pullet’s egg, but more 
irregular in shape. It was clear on the outside but 
milky at the center, making me think of a half-cooked 
globe of tapioca. But it was a stone of solid ice. 
And thousands and thousands of stones like tl it, mil- 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


265 


lions of them, were descending on my wheat, were 
thrashing down my half-ripened oats, were flailing the 
world and beating the life and beauty out of my crops. 

The storm ended almost as abruptly as it had begun. 
The hammers of Thor that were trying to pound my 
lonely little prairie-house to pieces were withdrawn, 
the tumult stopped, and the light grew stronger. 
Whinstane Sandy even roused himself and moved 
toward the door, which he opened with the hand of a 
sleep-walker, and stood staring out. I could see 
reflected in that seamed old face the desolation which 
for a minute or two I didn’t have the heart to look 
upon. I knew, even before I got slowly up and fol- 
lowed him toward the door, that our crop was gone, 
that we had lost everything. 

I stood in the doorway, staring out at what, only 
that morning, had been a world golden with promise, 
rich and bountiful and beautiful to the eye and blessed 
in the sight of God. And now, at one stroke, it was 
all wiped out. As far as the eye could see I beheld 
only flattened and shredded ruin. Every acre of my 
crop was gone. My year’s work had been for noth- 
ing, my blind planning, my petty scheming and con- 
triving, my foolish little hopes and dreams, all, all 
were there, beaten down into the mud. 

Yet, oddly enough, it did not stir in me any quick 
and angry passion of protest. It merely left me mute 
and stunned, staring at it with the eyes of the ox, 


266 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


with a dull wonder in my heart and a duller sense of 
deprivation away off at the back of my brain. I 
scarcely noticed when little Dinkie toddled out and 
possessed himself of a number of the larger hail- 
stones, which he promptly proceeded to suck. When a 
smaller one melted in the warmth of his hand, he stared 
down at the emptiness between his little brown fin- 
gers, wondering where his pretty pebble had vanished 
to, just as I wondered where my crop had gone. 

But it’s gone. There’s no doubt of that. The hail 
went from southwest to northeast, in a streak about 
three miles wide, like a conquering army, licking up 
everything as it went. Whinnie says that it’s the 
will of God. Struthers, resurrected from her mattress, 
proclaims that it’s Fate punishing us for our sins. 
My head tells me that it’s barometric laws, operating 
along their own ineluctable lines. But that doesn’t 
salve the sore. 

For the rest of the afternoon we stood about like 
Italian peasants after an earthquake, possessed of a 
sort of collective mutism, doing nothing, saying noth- 
ing, thinking nothing. Even my seven dead pullets, 
which had been battered to death by the hail, were left 
to lie where they had fallen. I noticed a canvas car- 
rier for a binder which Whinnie had been mending. 
It was riddled like a sieve. If this worried me, it 
worried me only vaguely. It wasn’t until I remem- 
bered that there would be no wheat for that binder 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


267 


to cut and no sheaves for that carrier to bear, that 
the extent of what had befallen Alabama Ranch once 
more came fully home to me. It takes time to digest 
such things, just as it takes time to reorganize your 
world. The McKails, for the second time, have been 
cleaned to the bones. We ought to be getting used to 
it, for it’s the second time we’ve gone bust in a year ! 

It wasn’t until yesterday morning that any kind of 
perspective came back to us. I went to bed the night 
before wondering about Dinky-Dunk and hoping 
against hope that he’d come galloping over to make 
sure his family were still in the land of the living. 
But he didn’t come. And before noon I learned that 
Casa Grande had not been touched by the hail. That 
at least was a relief, for it meant that Duncan was 
safe and sound. 

In a way, yesterday, there was nothing to do, and 
yet there was a great deal to do. It reminded me of 
the righting up after a funeral. But I refused to 
think of anything beyond the immediate tasks in hand. 
I just did what had to be done, and went to bed again 
dog-tired. But I had nightmare, and woke up in the 
middle of the night crying for all I w r as worth. I 
seemed alone in an empty world, a world without mean- 
ing or mercy, and there in the blackness of the night 
when the tides of life run lowest, I lay with my hand 
pressed against my heart, with the feeling that there 
was nothing whatever left in existence to make it 


268 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


worth while. Then Pee-Wee stirred and whimpered, 
and when I lifted him into mj bed and held him 
against my breast, the nearness of his body brought 
warmth and consolation to mine, and I remembered 
that I was still a mother. . . . 

It was this morning (Sunday) that Dinky -Dunk 
appeared at Alabama Ranch. I had looked for him 
and longed for him, in secret, and my heart should 
have leapt up with gladness at the sight of him. But 
it didn’t. It couldn’t. It was like asking a millstone 
to pirouette. 

In the first place, everything seemed wrong. I had 
a cold in the head from the sudden drop in the tem- 
perature, and I was arrayed in that drab old ging- 
ham wrapper which Dinkie had cut holes in with 
Struthers’ scissors, for I hadn’t cared much that morn- 
ing when I dressed whether I looked like a totem-pole 
or a Stoney squaw. And the dregs of what I’d been 
through during the last two days were still sour in 
the bottom of my heart. I was a Job in petticoats, a 
mutineer against man and God, a nihilist and an 
I. W. W. all in one. And Dinky-Dunk appeared in 
Lad}^ Alicia’s car, in her car, carefully togged out in 
his Sunday best, with that strangely alien aspect 
which citified clothes can give to the rural toiler when 
he emerges from the costume of his kind. 

But it wasn’t merely that he came arrayed in this 
outer shell of affluence and prosperity. It was more 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


269 


that there was a sense of triumph in his heart which 
he couldn’t possibly conceal. And I wasn’t slow to 
realize what it meant. I was a down-and-outer now, 
and at his mercy. He could have his way with me, 
■without any promise of protest. And whatever he 
might have done, or might yet do, it was ordained 
that I in my meekness should bow to the yoke. All 
that I must remember was that he stood my lord and 
master. I had made my foolish little struggle to be 
mistress of my own destiny, and now that I had failed, 
and failed utterly, I must bend to whatever might be 
given to me. 

“It’s hard luck, Chaddie,” he said, with a pretense 
at being sympathetic. But there was no real sorrow 
in his eye as he stood there surveying my devastated 
ranch. 

“Nix on that King Cophetua stuff!” I curtly and 
vulgarly proclaimed. 

“Just what do you mean?” he asked, studying my 
face. 

“Kindly can the condescension stuff!” I repeated, 
taking a wayward satisfaction out of shocking him 
with the paraded vulgarity of my phrasing. 

“That doesn’t sound like you,” he said, naturally 
surprised, I suppose, that I didn’t melt into his arms. 

“Why not?” I inquired, noticing that he no longer 
cared to meet my eye. 

“It sounds hard,” he said. 


27G 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“Well, some man has said that a hard soil makes 
a hard race,” I retorted, with a glance about at my 
ruined wheatlands. “Did you have a pleasant time 
in Chicago?” 

He looked up quickly. 

“I wasn’t in Chicago,” he promptly protested. 

“Then that woman lied, after all,” I remarked, 
with a lump of Scotch granite where my heart ought 
to have been. For I could see by his face that he 
knew, without hesitation, the woman I meant. 

“Isn’t that an unnecessarily harsh word?” he asked, 
trying, of course, to shield her to the last. And if 
he had not exactly winced, he had done the next 
thing to it. 

“ What would you call it ?” I countered. It wouldn’t 
have taken a microphone, I suppose, to discover the 
hostility in my tone. “And would it be going too far 
to inquire just where you were?” I continued as I saw 
he had no intention of answering my first question. 

“I was at the Coast,” he said, compelling himself to 
meet my glance. 

“I’m sorry that I cut your holiday short,” I 
told him. 

“It was scarcely a holiday,” he remonstrated. 

“What would you call it then?” I asked. 

“It was purely a business trip,” he retorted. 

There had, I remembered, been a great deal of that 
business during the past few months. And an ice- 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


Til 


cold hand squeezed the last hope of hope out of my 
heart. She had been at the Coast. 

“And this belated visit to your wife and children, I 
presume, is also for business purposes?” I inquired. 
But he was able to smile at that, for all my iciness. 

“Is it belatec^l?” he asked. 

“Wouldn’t you call it that?” I quietly inquired. 

“But I had to clear up that case of the stolen 
horses,” he protested, “that Sing Lo thievery.” 

“Which naturally comes before one’s family,” I 
ironically reminded him. 

“But courts are courts, Chaddie,” he maintained, 
with a pretense of patience. 

“And consideration is consideration,” I rather 
wearily amended. 

“We can’t always do what we want to,” he 
next remarked, apparently intent on being genially 
axiomatic. 

“Then to what must the humble family attribute 
this visit?” I inquired, despising that tone of mock- 
ery into which I had fallen yet seeming unable to 
drag myself out of its muck-bottom depths. 

“To announce that I intend to return to them,” he 
asserted, though it didn’t seem an easy statement 
to make. 

It rather took my breath away, for a moment. But 
Reason remained on her throne. It was too much like 
sticking spurs into a dead horse. There was too much 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


m 

that could not be forgotten. And I calmly reminded 
Dinky-Dunk that the lightest of heads can sometimes 
have the longest of memories. 

“Then you don’t want me back?” he demanded, 
apparently embarrassed by my lack of hospitality. 

“It all depends on what you mean by that word,” 
I answered, speaking as judicially as I was able. “If 
by coming back you mean coming back to this house, 
I suppose you have a legal right to do so. But if 
it means anything more, I’m afraid it can’t be done. 
You see, Dinky-Dunk, I’ve got rather used to single 
harness again, and I’ve learned to think and act for 
myself, and there’s a time when continued unfairness 
can kill the last little spark of friendliness in any 
woman’s heart. It’s not merely that I’m tired of it 
all. But I’m tired of being tired , if you know what 
that means. I don’t even know what I’m going to do. 
Just at present, in fact, I don’t want to think about it. 
But I’d much prefer being alone until I am able to 
straighten things out to my own satisfaction.” 

“I’m sorry,” said Dinky-Dunk, looking so crest- 
fallen that for a moment I in turn felt almost sorry 
for him. 

“Isn’t it rather late for that?” I reminded him. 

“Yes, I suppose it is,” he admitted, with a disturb- 
ing new note of humility. Then he looked up at me, 
almost defiantly. “But you need my help.” 

It was masterful man, once more asserting himself. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


273 


It was a trivial misstep, but a fatal one. It betrayed, 
at a flash, his entire mis judgment of me, of my feel- 
ings, of what I was and what I intended to be. 

“I’m afraid I’ve rather outlived that period of 
Bashi-Bazookism,” I coolly and quietly explained to 
my lord and master. “You may have the good luck 
to be confronting me when I seem to be floored. I’ve 
been hailed out, it’s true. But that has happened to 
other people, and they seem to have survived. And 
there are worse calamities, I find, than the loss of 
a crop.” 

“Are you referring to anything that I have done?” 
asked Dinky-Dunk, with a slightly belligerent look 
in his eye. 

“If the shoe fits, put it on,” I observed. 

“But there are certain things I want to explain,” 
he tried to argue, with the look of a man confronted 
by an overdraft on his patience. 

“Somebody has said that a friend,” I reminded him, 
“is a person to whom one need never explain. And 
any necessity for explanation, you see, removes us 
even from the realm of friendship.” 

“But, hang it all, I’m your husband,” protested my 
obtuse and somewhat indignant interlocutor. 

“We all have our misfortunes,” I found the heart, 
or rather the absence of heart, to remark. 

“I’m afraid this isn’t a very good beginning,” said 
Dinky-Dunk, his dignity more ruffled than ever. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


274 

"IPs not a beginning at all,” I reminded him. “It’s 
more like an ending.” 

That kept him silent for quite a long while. 

“I suppose you despise me,” he finally remarked. 

“It’s scarcely so active an emotion,” I tried to pun- 
ish him by retorting. 

“But I at least insist on explaining what took me 
to the Coast,” he contended. 

“That is scarcely necessary,” I told him. 

“Then you know?” he asked. 

“I imagine the whole country-side does,” I observed. 

He made a movement of mixed anger and protest. 

“I went to Vancouver because the government had 
agreed to take over my Vancouver Island water-front 
for their new shipbuilding yards. If you’ve for- 
gotten just what that means, I’d like to remind you 
that there’s ” 

“I don’t happen to have forgotten,” I interrupted, 
wondering why news which at one time would have 
set me on fire could now leave me quite cold. “But 
what caused the government to change its mind?” 

“Allie !” he said, after a moment’s hesitation, fixing 
a slightly combative eye on mine. 

“She seems to have almost unlimited powers,” I 
observed as coolly as I could, making an effort to get 
my scattered thoughts into line again. 

“On the contrary,” Dinky-Dunk explained with 
quite painful politeness, “it was merely the accident 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


275 


that she happened to know the naval officer on the 
Imperial Board. She was at Banff the week the board 
was there, and she was able to put in a good word 
for the Vancouver Island site. And the Imperial 
verdict swung our own government officials over.” 

64 You were lucky to have such an attractive wire- 
puller,” I frigidly announced. 

44 The luck wasn’t altogether on my side,” Dinky- 
Dunk almost as frigidly retorted, 44 when you remem- 
ber that it was giving her a chance to get rid of a 
ranch she was tired of !” 

I did my best to hide my surprise, but it wasn’t 
altogether a success. The dimensions of the move- 
ment, apparently, were much greater than my poor 
little brain had been able to grasp. 

“Do you mean it’s going to let you take Casa 
Grande off her ladyship’s hands?” I diffidently in- 
quired. 

“That’s already arranged for,” Dinky-Dunk quite 
casually informed me. We were a couple of play- 
actors, I felt, each deep in a role of his own, each 
stirred much deeper than he was ready to admit, and 
each a little afraid of the other. 

44 You are to be congratulated,” I told Dinky-Dunk, 
chilled in spite of myself, never for a moment quite 
able to forget the sinister shadow of Lady Alicia 
which lay across our trodden little path of every- 
day life. 


276 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“It was you and the kiddies I was thinking of,” 
said my husband, in a slightly remote voice. And the 
mockery of that statement, knowing what I knew, was 
too much for me. 

“Pm sorry you didn’t think of us a little sooner,” 
I observed. And I had the bitter-sweet reward of 
seeing a stricken light creep up into Dinky- 
Dunk’s eyes. 

“Why do you say that?” he asked. 

But I didn’t answer that question of his. Instead, 
I asked him another. 

“Did you know that Lady Alicia came here and 
announced that she was in love with you ?” I 
demanded, resolved to let the light in to that tangled 
mess which was fermenting in the silo of my soul. 

“Yes, I know,” he quietly affirmed, as he hung his 
head. “She told me about it. And it was awful . It 
should never have happened. It made me ashamed 
even — even to face you !” 

“That was natural,” I agreed, with my heart still 
steeled against him. 

“It makes a fool of a man,” he protested, “a situa- 
tion like that.” 

“Then the right sort of man wouldn’t encourage 
it,” I reminded him, “wouldn’t even permit it.” And 
still again I caught that quick movement of impa- 
tience from him. 

“What’s that sort of thing to a man of my age?” 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


m 

he demanded. “When you get to where I am you 
don’t find love looming so large on the horizon. 
What—” 

“No, it clearly doesn’t loom so large,” I interrupted. 

“What you want then,” went on Dinky-Dunk, 
ignoring me, “is power, success, the consolation of 
knowing you’re not a failure in life. That’s the big 
issue, and that’s the stake men play big for, and play 
hard for.” 

It was, I remembered in my bitterness of soul, what 
I myself had been playing hard for — but I had lost. 
And it had left my heart dry. It had left my heart 
so dry that my own Dinky-Dunk, standing there 
before me in the open sunlight, seemed millions of 
miles removed from me, mysteriously depersonalized, 
as remote in spirit as a stranger from Mars come to 
converse about an inter-stellar telephone-system. 

“Then you’ve really achieved your ambition,” I 
reminded my husband, as he stood studying a face 
which I tried to keep tranquil under his inspection. 

“Oh, no,” he corrected, “only a small part of it.” 

“What’s the rest?” I indifferently inquired, won- 
dering why most of life’s victories, after all, were 
mere Pyrrhic victories. 

“You,” declared Dinky-Dunk, with a reckless light 
in his eyes. “You, and the children, now that I’m in 
a position to give them what they want.” 

“But are you?” I queried. 


ns 1 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“Well, that’s what I’m coming back to demon- 
strate,” he found the courage to assert. 

“To them?” I asked. 

“To all of you!” he said with a valiant air of 
finality. 

I told him it was useless, but he retorted that he 
didn’t propose to have that stop him. I explained to 
him that it would be embarrassing, but he parried 
that claim by protesting that sacrifice was good for 
the soul. I asserted that it would be a good deal of 
a theatricality, under the circumstances, but he 
attempted to brush this aside by stating that what he 
had endured for years might be repeated by patience. 

So Dinky-Dunk is coming back to Alabama Ranch ! 
It sounds momentous, and yet, I know in my heart, 
that it doesn’t mean so very much. He will sleep 
under the same roof with me as remote as though he 
were reposing a thousand miles away. He will break- 
fast and go forth to his work, and my thoughts will 
not be able to go with him. He will return with the 
day’s weariness in his bones, but a weariness which 
I can neither fathom nor explain in my own will keep 
my blood from warming at the sound of his voice 
through the door. Being still his wife, I shall have 
to sew and mend and cook for him. That is the pen- 
alty of prairie life; there is no escape from pro- 
pinquity. 

But that life can go on in this way, indefinitely, is 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 279 

unthinkable. What will happen, I don’t know. But 
there will have to be a change, somewhere. There will 
have to be a change, but I am too tired to worry over 
what it will be. I’m too tired even to think of it. 
That’s something which lies in the lap of Time. 


/ 


Saturday the Twenty-fifth 

Dinky-Dunk is back. At least he sleeps and break- 
fasts at home, but the rest of the time he is over at 
Casa Grande getting his crop cut. He’s too busy, I 
fancy, to pay much attention to our mutual lack of 
attention. But the compact was made, and he seems 
willing to comply with it. The only ones who fail 
to regard it are the children. I hadn’t counted on 
them. There are times, accordingly, when they some- 
what complicate the situation. It didn’t take them 
long to get re-acquainted with their daddy. I could 
see, from the first, that he intended to be very con- 
siderate and kind with them, for I’m beginning to 
realize that he gets a lot of fun out of the kiddies. 
Pee-Wee will go to him, now, from anybody. He 
goes with an unmistakable expression of “Us-men- 
have-got-to-stick-together” satisfaction on his little 
face. 

But Dinky-Dunk’s intimacies, I’m glad to say, do 
not extend beyond the children. Three days ago, 
though, he asked me about turning his hogs in on my 
land. It doesn’t sound disturbingly emotional. But 
if what’s left of my crop, of course, is any use to 
Duncan, he’s welcome to it. . . . 


280 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


281 


I looked for that letter which I wrote to Dinky- 
Dunk several weeks ago, looked for it for an hour and 
more this morning, but haven’t succeeded in finding 
it. I was sure that I’d put it between the pages of 
the old ranch journal. But it’s not there. 

Last night before I turned in I read all of Mere- 
dith’s Modem Love . It was nice to remember that 
once, at Box Hill, I’d felt the living clasp of the hand 
which had written that wonderful series of poems. 
But never before did I quite understand that elabo- 
rated essay in love-moods. It came like a friendly 
voice, like an understanding comrade who knows the 
world better than I do, and brought me comfort, even 
though the sweetness of it was slightly acidulated, 
like a lemon-drop. And as for myself, I suppose I’ll 
continue to 

“ sit contentedly 

And eat my pot of honey on the grave.” 


Sunday the Second 


I have written to Uncle Carlton again, asking him 
about my Chilean Nitrate shares. If the company’s 
reorganized and the mines opened again, surely my 
stock ought to be worth something. 

The days are getting shorter, and the hot weather 
is over for good, I hope. I usually like autumn on 
the prairie, but the thought of fall, this year, doesn’t 
fill me with any inordinate joy. I’m unsettled and 
atonic, and it’s just as well, I fancy, that I’m wean- 
ing the Twins. 

It’s not the simple operation I’d expected, but tht 
worst is already over. Pee-Wee is betraying unmis- 
takable serpentine powers, and it’s no longer safe to 
leave him on a bed. Poppsy is a fastidious little lady, 
and apparently a bit of a philosopher. She is her 
father’s favorite. Whinstane Sandy is loyal to little 
Dinkie, and, now that the evenings are longer, regales 
him on stories, stories which the little tot can only 
half understand. But they must always be about ani- 
mals, and Whinnie seems to run to wolves. He’s told 
the story of the skater and the wolves, with personal 
embellishments, and Little Red Riding-Hood in a 
282 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


283 


version all his own, and last night, I noticed, he 
recounted the tale of the woman in the sleigh with 
her children when the pack of wolves pursued her. 
And first, to save herself and her family, she threw 
her little baby out to the brutes. And when they had 
gained on her once more, she threw out her little girl, 
and then her little boy, and then her biggest boy of 
ten. And when she reached a settlement and told of 
her deliverance, the Oldest Settler took a wood-ax and 
clove her head clear down to the shoulder-blades — 
the same, of course, being a punishment for saving 
herself at the expense of her little ones. 

My Dinkie sat wriggling his toes with delight, the 
tale being of that gruesome nature which appeals to 
him. It must have been tried on countless other chil- 
dren, for, despite Whinnie’s autobiographical inter- 
jections, the yarn is an old and venerable one, a primi- 
tive Russian folk-tale which even Browning worked 
over in his Ivan Ivanovitch. 

Dinky-Dunk, wandering in on the tail end of it, 
remarked : “That’s a fine story, that is, with all those 
coyotes singing out there !” 

“The chief objection to it,” I added, “is that the 
lady didn’t drop her husband over first.” 

Dinky-Dunk looked down at me as he filled his pipe. 

“But the husband, as I remember the story, had 
been left behind to do what a mere husband could to 
save their home,” my spouse quietly reminded me. 


Monday the Tenth 


There was a heavy frost last night. It makes me 
feel that summer is over. Dinky-Dunk asked me 
yesterday why I disliked Casa Grande and never ven- 
tured over into that neighborhood. I evaded any 
answer by announcing that there were very few things 
I liked nowadays. 

Only once, lately, have we spoken of Lady Allie. 
It was Dinky-Dunk, in fact, who first brought up her 
name in speaking of the signing of the transfer- 
papers. 

“Is it true,” I found the courage to ask, “that vou 
knew your cousin quite intimately as a girl?” 

Dinky-Dunk laughed as he tamped down his pipe. 

“Yes, it must have been quite intimately,” he 
acknowledged. “For when she was seven and I was 
nine we went all the way down Teignmouth Hill 
together in an empty apple-barrel — than which noth- 
ing that I know of could possibty be more intimate !” 

I couldn’t join him in his mirth over that incident, 
for I happened to remember the look on Lady Alicia’s 
face when she once watched Dinky-Dunk mount his 
mustang and ride away. “Aren’t men lawds of cre- 
284 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


285 


ation?” she had dreamily inquired. “Not after you’ve 
lived with them for a couple of years,” I had been 
heartless enough to retort, just to let her know that 
I didn’t happen to have a skin like a Douglas pine. 


Sunday the Sixteenth 


I’ve just had a letter from Uncle Carlton. It’s a 
very long and businesslike letter, in which he goes 
into details as to how our company has been incor- 
porated in La Association de Productores de Salitre 
de Chile , with headquarters at Valparaiso. It’s a new 
and rather unexpected arrangement, but he prophesies 
that with nitrate at ten shillings per Spanish quintal 
the returns on the investment, under the newer condi- 
tions, should be quite satisfactory. He goes on to 
explain how nitrate is shipped in bags of one hundred 
kilos, and the price includes the bags, but the weight 
is taken on the nitrate only, involving a deduction 
from the gross weight of seven-tenths per cent. 
Then he ambles off into a long discussion of how the 
fixation method from the air may eventually threaten 
the stability of our entire amalgamated mines, but 
probably not during his life-time or even my own. 
And I had to read the letter over for the third time 
before I winnowed from it the obscure but essential 
kernel that my shares from this year forward should 
bring me in an annual dividend of at least two thou- 
sand, but more probably three, and possibly even four, 
286 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


287 


once the transportation situation is normalized, but 
depending largely, of course, on the labor conditions 
obtaining in Latin America — and much more along 
the same lines. 

That news of my long-forgotten and long-neglected 
nest-egg should have made me happy. But it didn’t. 
I couldn’t quite react to it. As usual, I thought of 
the children first, and from their standpoint it did 
bring a sort of relief. It was consoling, of course, 
to know that, whatever happened, they could have 
woolens on their little tummies and shoe-leather on 
their little piggies. But the news didn’t come w r ith 
sufficient force to shock the dull gray emptiness out 
of existence. I’ve even been wondering if there’s any 
news that could. For the one thing that seems always 
to face me is the absence of intensity from life. Can 
it be, I found myself asking to-day, that it’s youth, 
golden youth, that is slipping away from me? 

It startled me a little, to have to face that question. 
But I shake my fist in the teeth of Time. I refuse 
to surrender. I shall not allow myself to become anti- 
quated. I’m on the wrong track, in some way, but 
before I dry up into a winter apple I’m going to find 
out where the trouble is, and correct it. I never was 
much of a sleep-walker. I want life, Life — and 
oodles of it. . . . 

Among other things, by the way, which I’ve been 
missing are books. They at least are to be had for 


288 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


the buying, and I’ve decided there’s no excuse for let- 
ting the channels of my mind get moss-grown. I’ve 
had a “serious but not fatal wound,” as the news- 
papers say, to my personal vanity, but there’s no 
use in letting go of things, at my time of life. Pee- 
Wee, I’m sure, will never be satisfied with an empty- 
headed old frump for a mother, and Dinkie is already 
asking questions that are slightly disturbing. Yester- 
day, in his bath, he held his hand over his heart. He 
held it there for quite a long time, and then he looked 
at me with widening eyes. “Mummy,” he called out, 
“I’ve got a m’sheen inside me!” And Whinnie’s 
explorations are surely worth emulating. I too have 
a machine inside me which some day I’ll be compelled 
to rediscover. It is a machine which, at present, is 
merely a pump, though the ancients, I believe, 
regarded it as the seat of the emotions. 


Saturday the Twenty-ninth 


Dinky-Dunk' is quite subtle. He is ignoring me, 
as a modern army of assault ignores a fortress by 
simply circling about its forbidding walls and leav- 
ing it in the rear. But I can see that he is deliber- 
ately and patiently making love to my children. He 
is entrenching himself in their affection. 

He is, of course, their father, and it is not for me 
to interfere. Last night, in fact, when Pee-Wee cried 
for his dad, poor old Dinky-Dunk’s face looked almost 
radiumized. He has announced that on Tuesday, 
when he will have to go in to Buckhorn, he intends to 
carry along the three kiddies and have their photo- 
graph taken. It reminded me that I had no picture 
whatever of the Twins. And that reminded me, in 
turn, of what a difference there is between your first 
child and the tots who come later. Little Dinkie, 
being a novelty, was followed by a phosphorescent 
wake of diaries and snap-shots and weigh-scales and 
growth-records, with his birthdays duly reckoned, not 
by the year, but by the month. 

It’s not that I love the Twins less. It’s only that 
the novelty has passed. And in one way it’s a good 
thing, for over your second and third baby you worry 

2S9 


290 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


less. You know what is needed, and how to do it. 
You blaze 3 T our trail, as a mother, with jour first-born. 
You build jour road, and after that jou are no longer 
a pioneer. You know the waj jou have to go, hence- 
forth, and jou follow it. It is less a Great Adven- 
ture, perhaps, but, on the other hand, the double- 
pointed tooth of Anxietj does not rowel quite so often 
at the core of jour heart. . . . I’ve been wonder- 

ing if, with the coming of the children, there is not 
something which slips awaj from the relationship 
between husband and wife. That there is a difference 
is not to be denied. There was a time when I resented 
this and tried to fight against it. But I wasn’t big 
enough, I suppose, to block the course of Nature. 
And it was Nature, jou have to admit when jou come 
to look it honestlj in the face, Nature in her inexor- 
able economj working out her inexorable ends. If I 
hadn’t loved Dinkj-Dunk, fondlj, foolislilj, aban- 
donedlj, there would have been no little Dinkie and 
Popps j and Pee-Wee. Thej would have been left 
to wander like disconsolate little ghosts through that 
lonelj and twilit No-Man’s Land of barren love and 
unwanted babes. And the onlj thing that keeps me 
human, nowadajs, that keeps me from being a woman 
with a dead soul, a she-being of untenanted hide and 
bones and dehjdrated ham-strings, is mj kiddies. The 
thought of them, at anj time of the daj, can put a 
cedilla under mj heart to soften it. 


THE PRAIRIE M01 HER 


291 


Struthers, who is to go in to Buckhorn with the 
children when they have their picture taken, is already 
deep in elaborating preparations for that expedition. 
She is improvising an English nurse’s uniform and 
has asked if there might be one picture of her and 
the children. 


Tuesday the Fifteenth 


The children have been away for a whole day, the 
first time in family history. And oh, what a difference 
it makes in this lonely little prairie home of ours! 
The quietness, the emptiness, the desolation of it all 
was something quite beyond my imagination. I know 
now that I could never live apart from them. What- 
ever happens, I shall not be separated from my 
kiddies. 

I spent my idle time in getting Peter’s music-box 
in working order. Dinky-Dunk, who despises it, 
thoughtlessly sat on the package of records and broke 
three of them. Pve been trying over the others. They 
sound tinny and flat, and I’m beginning to suspect I 
haven’t my sound-box adjusted right. I’ve a hunger 
to hear good music. And without quite knowing it, 
I’ve been craving for city life again, for at least a 
taste of it, for even a chocolate cream-soda at a Huyler 
counter. Dinky-Dunk yesterday said that I was a 
cloudy creature, and accused me of having a mutinous 
mouth. Men seem to think that love should be like 
an eight-day clock, with a moment or two of indus- 
trious winding-up rewarded by a long week of undevi- 
ating devotion. 


292 


Sunday the Twenty-seventn 

The thrashing outfits are over at Casa Grande, and 
my being a mere spectator of the big and busy final 
act of the season’s drama reminds me of three years 
ago, just before Dinkie arrived. Struthers, however, 
is at Casa Grande and in her glory, the one and only 
woman in a circle of nine active-bodied men. 

I begin to see that it’s true what Dinky-Dunk said 
about business looming bigger in men’s lives than 
women are apt to remember. He’s working hard, and 
his neck’s so thin that his Adam’s apple sticks out 
like a push-button, but he gets his reward in finding 
his crop running much higher than he had figured. 
He’s as keen as ever he was for power and prosperity. 
He wants success, and night and day he’s scheming 
for it. Sometimes I wonder if he didn’t deliberately 
use his cousin Allie in this juggling back of Casa 
Grande into his own hands. Yet Dinky-Dunk, with 
all his faults, is not, and could not be, circuitous. I 
feel sure of that. 

He became philosophical, the other day wdien I com- 
plained about the howling of the coyotes, and pro- 
tested it w T as these horizon-singers that kept the prai- 
293 


294 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER ' 


rie clean. He even argued that the flies which seem 
such a pest to the cattle in summer-time are a blessing 
in disguise, since the unmolested animals over-eat when 
feed is plentiful and get black-rot. So out of suffer- 
ing comes wisdom and out of endurance comes forti- 
tude ! 


Thursday the Sixth 


On Tuesday morning we had our first snow of the 
season, or, rather, before the season. It wasn’t much 
of a snow-storm, but Dinkie was greatly worked up 
at the sight of it and I finally put on his little reefer 
and his waders and let him go out in it. But the 
weather had moderated, the snow turned to slush, and 
when I rescued Dinkie from rolling in what looked to 
him like a world of ice-cream he was a very wet boy. 

On Tuesday night Dinkie, usually so sturdy and 
strong, woke up with a tight little chest-cough that 
rather frightened me. I went over to his crib and 
covered him up. But when he wakened me again, a 
couple of hours later, the cough had grown tighter. 
It turned into a sort of sharp bark. And this time 
I found Dinkie hot and feverish. So I got busy, rub- 
bing his chest with sweet oil and turpentine until the 
skin was pink and giving him a sip or two of cherry 
pectoral which I still had on the upper shelf of the 
cupboard. 

When morning came he was no better. He seemed 
in a stupor, rousing only to bark into his pillow. I 
called Dinky -Dunk in, before he left in the pouring 
295 


296 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


rain for Casa Grande, and he said, almost indiffer- 
ently, “Yes, the boy’s got a cold all right.” But 
that was all. 

When breakfast was over I tried Dinkie with hot 
gruel, but he declined it. He refused to eat, in fact, 
and remembering what Peter had once said about my 
first-born being pantophagous, I began to suspect 
that I had a very sick boy on my hands. 

At noon, when he seemed no better, I made a mild 
mustard-plaster and put it on the upper part of his 
little chest. I let it burn there until he began to cry 
with the discomfort of it. Then I tucked a double fold 
of soft flannel above his thorax. 

As night came on he was more flushed and feverish 
than ever, and I wished to heaven that I’d a clinic 
thermometer in the house. For by this time I was 
more than worried: I was panicky. Yet Duncan, when 
he came in, and got out of his oil-skins, didn’t seem 
very sympathetic. He flatly refused to share my 
fears. The child, he acknowledged, had a croupy lit- 
tle chest-cold, but all he wanted was keeping warm and 
as much water as he could drink. Nature, he largely 
protested, would attend to a case like that. 

I was ready to turn on him like a she-tiger, but I 
held myself in, though it took an effort. I saw 
Duncan go off to bed, dog-tired, of course, but I felt 
that to go to sleep, under the circumstances, would 
be criminal. Dinkie, in the meantime, was waking 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


297 


'every now and then and barking like a baby-coyote. 
I could have stood it, I suppose, if that old Bobs of 
ours hadn’t started howling outside, in long-drawn 
and dreary howls of unutterable woe. I remembered 
about a dog always howling that way when somebody 
was going to die in the house. And I concluded, with 
an icy heart, that it was the death-howl. I tried to 
count Dinkie’s pulse, but it was so rapid and I was so 
nervous that I lost track of the beats. So I decided to 
call Dinky-Dunk. 

He came in to us kind of sleepy-eyed and with his 
hair rumpled up, and asked, without thinking, what 
I wanted. 

And I told him, with a somewhat shaky voice, what 
I wanted. I said I wanted antiphlogistine, and a 
pneumonia- jacket, and a doctor, and a trained nurse, 
and just a few of the comforts of civilization. 

Dinky-Dunk, staring at me as though I were a mad- 
woman, went over to Dinkie’s crib, and felt his fore- 
head and the back of his neck, and held an ear against 
the boy’s chest, and then against his shoulder-blades. 
He said it was all right, and that I myself ought to 
be in bed. As though in answer to that Dinkie barked 
out his croupy protest, tight and hard, barked as I’d 
never heard a child bark before. And I began to fuss, 
for it tore my heart to think of that little body burn- 
ing up with fever and being denied its breath. 

“You might just as well get back to bed,” repeated 


298 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


Dinky-Dunk, rather impatiently. And that was the 
spark which set off the mine, which pushed me clear 
over the edge of reason. I’d held myself in for so 
long, during weeks and weeks of placid-eyed self- 
repression, that when the explosion did come I went 
off like a Big Bertha. I turned on my husband with 
a red light dancing before my face and told him he 
was a beast and a heartless brute. He tried to stop 
me, but it was no use. I even said that this was a hell 
of a country, where a white woman had to live like 
a Cree squaw and a child had to die like a sick hound 
in a coulee. And I said a number of other things, 
which must have cut to the raw, for even in the uncer- 
tain lamplight I could see that Dinky-Dunk’s face 
had become a kind of lemon-color, which is the nearest 
to white a sunburned man seems able to turn. 

“I’ll get a doctor, if you want one,” he said, with 
an over-tried-patience look in his eyes. 

“/ don’t want a doctor,” I told him, a little shrill- 
voiced with indignation. “It’s the child who wants 
one.” 

“I’ll get your doctor,” he repeated as he began 
dressing, none too quickly. And it took him an inter- 
minable time to get off, for it was raining cats and 
dogs, a cold, sleety rain from the northeast, and the 
shafts had to be taken off the buckboard and a pole 
put in, for it would require a team to haul anything 
on wheels to Buckhorn, on such a night. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


299 


It occurred to me, as I stood at the window and saw 
Dinky-Dunk’s lantern wavering about in the rain 
while he was getting the team and hooking them on 
to the buckboard, that it would be only the decent 
thing to send him off with a cup of hot coffee, now 
that I had the kettle boiling. But he’d martyrize 
himself, I knew, by refusing it, even though I made it. 
And he was already sufficiently warmed by the fires 
of martyrdom. 

Yet it was an awful night, I realized when I stood 
in the open door and stared after him as he swung 
out into the muddy trail with the stable lantern lashed 
to one end of his dashboard. And I felt sorry, and a 
little guilty, about the neglected cup of coffee. 

I went back to little Dinkie, and found him asleep. 
So I sat down beside him. I sat there wrapped up in 
one of Dinky-Dunk’s four-point Hudson-Bay s, decid- 
ing that if the child’s cough grew tighter I’d rig up 
a croup-tent, as I’d once seen Chinkie’s doctor do with 
little Gimlets. But Dinkie failed to waken. And I 
fell asleep myself, and didn’t open an eye until I half- 
tumbled out of the chair, well on toward morning. 

By the time Dinky-Dunk got back with the doctor, 
who most unmistakably smelt of Scotch whisky, I had 
breakfast over and the house in order and the Twins 
fed and bathed and off for their morning nap. I had 
a fresh nightie on little Dinkie, who rather upset me 
by announcing that he wanted to get up and play with 


300 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


his Noah’s Ark, for his fever seemed to have slipped 
away from him and the tightness had gone from his 
cough. But I said nothing as that red-faced and 
sweet- scented doctor looked the child over. His stetho- 
scope, apparently, tickled Dinkie’s ribs, for after try- 
ing to wriggle away a couple of times he laughed out 
loud. The doctor also laughed. But Dinky-Dunk’s 
eye happened to meet mine. 

It would be hard to describe his expression. All 
I know is that it brought a disagreeable little sense 
of shame to my hypocritical old heart, though I 
wouldn’t have acknowledged it, for worlds. 

44 Why, those lungs are clear,” I heard the man of 
medicine saying to my husband. 44 It’s been a nasty 
little cold, of course, but nothing to worry over.” 

His optimism struck me as being rather unpro- 
fessional, for if you travel half a night to a case, it 
seems to me, it ought not to be brushed aside with a 
laugh. And I was rather sorry that I had such a 
good breakfast waiting for them. Duncan, it’s true, 
did not eat a great deal, but the way that red-faced 
doctor lapped up my coffee with clotted cream and 
devoured bacon and eggs and hot muffins should have 
disturbed any man with an elementary knowledge of 
dietetics. And by noon Dinkie was pretty much his 
old self again. I half expected that Duncan would 
rub it in a little. But he has remained discreetly 
silent. 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


301 


Next time, of course, I’ll have a better idea of what 
to do. But I’ve been thinking that this exquisite and 
beautiful animalism known as the maternal instinct 
can sometimes emerge from its exquisiteness. Chil- 
dren are a joy and a glory, but you pay for that joy 
and glory when you see them stretched out on a bed 
of pain, with the shadow of Death hovering over them. 

When I tried to express something like this to 
Dunkie last night, somewhat apologetically, he looked 
at me with an odd light in his somber old Scotch 
Canadian eye. 

“Wait until you see him really ill,” he remarked, 
man-like, stubbornly intent on justifying himself. 
But I was too busy saying a little prayer, demand- 
ing of Heaven that such a day might never come, to 
bother about delivering myself of the many labori- 
ously concocted truths which I’d assembled for my 
bone-headed lord and master. I was grateful enough 
for things as they were, and I could afford to be 
generous. 


Sunday the Ninth 


For the first time since I came out on the prairie, 
I dread the thought of winter. Yet it’s really some- 
thing more than the winter I dread, since snow and 
cold have no terrors for me. I need only to look back 
about ten short months and think of those crystal- 
clear winter days of ours, with the sleigh piled up 
with its warm bear-robes, the low sun on the endless 
sea of white, the air like champagne, the spanking 
team frosted with their own breath, the caroling 
sleigh-bells, and the man who still meant so much to 
me at my side. Then the homeward drive at night, 
under violet clear skies, over drifts of diamond-dust, 
to the warmth and peace and coziness of one’s own 
hearth ! It was often razor-edge weather, away below 
zero, but we had furs enough to defy any threat of 
frost-nip. 

We still have the furs, it’s true, but there’s the 
promise of a different kind of frost in the air now, a 
black frost that creeps into the heart which no furs 
can keep warm. . . . 

We still have the furs, as I’ve already said, and 
I’ve been looking them over. They’re so plentiful 
302 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


303 


in this country tnat I’ve rather lost my respect 
for them. Back in the old days I used to invade 
those mirrored and carpeted salons where a trained 
and deferential saleswoman would slip sleazy and 
satin-lined moleskin coats over my arms and adjust 
baby-bear and otter and ermine and Hudson- 
seal next to my skin. It always gave me a very 
luxurious and Empressy sort of feeling to see 
myself arrayed, if only experimentally, in silver- 
fox and plucked beaver and fisher, to feel the soft 
pelts and observe how well one’s skin looked above 
seal-brown or shaggy bear. 

But I never knew what it cost. I never even con- 
sidered where they came from, or what they grew on, 
and it was to me merely a vague and unconfirmed 
legend that they were all torn from the carcasses of 
far-away animals. Prairie life has brought me a lit- 
tle closer to that legend, and now that I know what I 
do, it makes a difference. 

For with the coming of the cold weather, last win- 
ter, Francois and Whinstane Sandy took to trapping, 
to fill in the farm-work hiatus. They made it a cam- 
paign, and prepared for it carefully, concocting 
stretching-rings and cutting-boards and fashioning 
rabbit-snares and overhauling wicked-looking iron 
traps, which were quite ugly enough even before they 
became stained and clotted and rusted with blood. 

They had a very successful season, but even at the 


SO 4 THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 

first it struck me as odd to see two men, not outwardly 
debased, so soberly intent on their game of killing. 
And in the end I got sick of the big blood-rusted traps 
and the stretching-rings and the blood-smeared cut- 
ting-boards and the smell of pelts being cured. For 
every pelt, I began to see, meant pain and death. In 
one trap Francois found only the foot of a young 
red fox: it had gnawed its leg off to gain freedom 
from those vicious iron jaws that had bitten so sud- 
denly into its flesh and bone and sinew. He also told 
me of finding a young bear which had broken the 
anchor-chain of a twelve-pound trap and dragged it 
over one hundred miles. All the fight, naturally, was 
gone out of the little creature. It was -whimpering 
like a woman when Francois came up with it — poor 
little tortured broken-hearted thing ! And some 
empty-headed heiress goes mincing into the Metro- 
politan, on a Caruso night, very proud and peacocky 
over her new ermine coat, without ever dreaming it’s a 
patchwork of animal sufferings that is keeping her 
fat body warm, and that she’s trying to make herself 
beautiful in a hundred tragedies of the wild. 

If women only thought of these things ! But we 
women have a very convenient hand-made imagination 
all our own, and what upsets us as perfect ladies we 
graciously avoid. Yet if the petticoated Vandal in 
that ermine coat were compelled to behold from her 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


305 


box-chair in the Metropolitan, not a musty old lo\e- 
affair set to music, but the spectacle of how each little 
animal whose skin she has appropriated had been made 
to suffer, the hours and sometimes days of torture it 
had endured, and how, if still alive when the trapper 
made the rounds of his sets, it had been carefully 
strangled to death by that frugal harvester, to the 
end that the pelt might not be bloodied and reckoned 
only as a “second” — if the weasel-decked lady, I 
repeat, had to witness all this with her own beaded 
eyes, our wilderness would not be growing into quite 
such a lonely wilderness. 

Or some day, let’s put it, as one of these beaver- 
clad ladies tripped through the Ramble in Central 
Park, supposing a steel-toothed trap suddenly and 
quite unexpectedly snapped shut on her silk-stock- 
inged ankle and she writhed and moaned there in 
public, over the week-end. Then possibly her cries 
of suffering might make her sisters see a little more 
light. But the beaver, they tell me, is trapped under 
the ice, always in running w r ater. A mud-ball is placed 
a little above the waiting trap, to leave the water 
opaque, and when the angry iron jaws have snapped 
shut on their victim, that victim drowns, a prisoner. 
Francois used to contend shruggingly that it was an 
easy death. It may be easy compared with some of 
the other deaths imposed on his furry captives. But 


306 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


it’s not my idea of bliss, drowning under a foot or two 
of ice with a steel trap mangling your ankle for full 
measure ! 

“We live forward, but we understand backward.” 
I don’t know who first said it. But the older I grow 
the more I realize how true it is. 


Sunday the Umptieth 


I’ve written to Peter, reminding him of his promise, 
and asking about the Pasadena bungalow. 

It seems the one way out. I’m tired of living like 
an Alpine ibex, all day long above the snow-line. I’m 
tired of this blind alley of inaction. I’m tired of 
decisions deferred and threats evaded. I want to get 
away to think things over, to step back and regain a 
perspective on the over-smudged canvas of life. 

To remain at Alabama Ranch during the winter can 
mean only a winter of discontent and drifting — and 
drifting closer and closer to uncharted rocky ledges. 
There’s no ease for the mouth where one tooth aches, 
as the Chinese say. 

Dinky-Dunk, I think, has an inkling of how I feel. 
He is very thoughtful and kind in small things, and 
sometimes looks at me with the eyes of a boy’s dog 
which has been forbidden to follow the village gang 
a-field. And it’s not that I dislike him, or that he 
grates on me, or that I’m not thankful enough for 
the thousand and one little kind things he does. Rut 
it’s rubbing on the wrong side of the glass. It can’t 
bring back the past. My husband of to-day is not 
307 


308 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


the Hinky-Dunk I once knew and loved and laughed 
with. To go back to dogs, it reminds me of Chinkie’s 
St. Bernard, “Father Tom,” whom Chinkie petted and 
trained and loved almost to adoration. And when poor 
old Father Tom was killed Chinkie in his madness 
insisted that a taxidermist should stuff and mount that 
dead dog, which stood, thereafter, not a quick and liv- 
ing companion but a rather gruesome monument of a 
vanished friendship. It was, of course, the shape and 
color of the thing he had once loved; but you can’t 
feed a hungry heart by staring at a pair of glass eyes 
and a wired tail without any wag in it. 


Saturday the Ninth 


Struthers and I have been busy making clothes, 
during the absence of Dinky-Dunk, who has been off 
duck-shooting for the last three days. He complained 
of being a bit tuckered out and having stood the gaff 
too long and needing a change. The outing will do 
him good. The children miss him, of course, but he’s 
promised to bring Dinkie home an Indian bow- 
and-arrow. I can see death and destruction hanging 
over the glassware of this household. . . . The 

weather has been stormy, and yesterday Whinnie and 
Struthers put up the stove in the bunk-house. They 
were a long time about it, but I was reluctant to stop 
the flutterings of Cupid’s wings. 


V 


309 


Tuesday the Twelfth 


I had a brief message from Peter stating the Pasa- 
dena house is entirely at my disposal. . . . Dinky- 

Dunk came back with a real pot-hunter’s harvest of 
wild ducks, which we’ll pick and dress and freeze for 
winter use. I’m taking the breast-feathers for my 
pillows and Whinstane Sandy is taking what’s left 
for a sleeping-bag — from which I am led to infer 
that he’s still reconciled to a winter of solitude. 
Struthers, I know, could tell him of a warmer bag than 
that, lined with downier feathers from the pinions of 
Eros. But, as I’ve said before, Fate, being blind, 
weaves badly. 


310 


Friday the Fifteenth 


I’ve just told Dinky-Dunk of my decision to take 
the kiddies to California for the winter months. He 
rather surprised me by agreeing with everything I 
suggested. He feels, I think, as I do, that there’s 
danger in going aimlessly on and on as we have been 
doing. And it’s really a commonplace for the prairie 
rancher — when he can afford it — to slip down to Cali- 
fornia for the winter. They go by the thousand, by 
the train-load. 


311 


Friday the Sixth 


It’s three long weeks since I’ve had time for either 
ink or retrospect. But at last I’m settled, though I 
feel as though I’d died and ascended into Heaven, or 
at least changed my world, as the Chinks say, so dif- 
ferent is Pasadena to the prairie and Alabama Ranch. 
For as I sit here on the loggia of Peter’s house I’m 
bathed in a soft breeze that is heavy with a fragrance 
of flowers, the air is the air of our balmiest midsum- 
mer, and in a pepper-tree not thirty feet away a 
mocking-bird is singing for all it’s worth. It seems 
a poignantly beautiful world. And everything sug- 
gests peace. But it was not an easy peace to attain. 

In the first place, the trip down was rather a night- 
mare. It brought home to me the fact that I had three 
young barbarians to break and subjugate, three un- 
trained young outlaws who went wild with their first 
plunge into train-travel and united in defiance of 
Struthers and her foolishly impressive English uni- 
form which always makes me think of Regent Park. 
I have a suspicion that Dinky-Dunk all the while knew 
of the time I’d have, but sagely held his peace. 

I had intended, when I left home, to take the boat 

312 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


313 


at Victoria and go down to San Pedro, for I was 
hungry for salt water and the feel of a rolling deck 
under my feet again. But the antics of my three 
little outlaws persuaded me, before we pulled into Cal- 
gary, that it would be as well to make the trip south 
as short a one as possible. Dinkie disgraced me in the 
dining-car by insisting on “drinking” his mashed 
potatoes, and made daily and not always ineffectual 
efforts to appropriate all the fruit on the table, and 
on the last day, when I’d sagaciously handed him over 
to the tender mercies of Struthers, I overheard this 
dialogue : 

“I want shooder in my soup !” 

“But little boys don’t eat sugar in their soup.” 

“I want shooder in my soup!” 

“But, darling, mommie doesn’t eat sugar in her 
soup !” 

“Shooder! Dinkie wants shooder, shooder in his 
soup !” 

“Daddy never eats shooder in his soup, Sweetness.” 

“I want shooder !” 

“But really nice little boys don’t ask for sugar in 
their soup,” argued the patient-eyed Struthers. 

“Shooder!” insisted the implacable tyrant. And he 
got it. 

There was an exceptional number of babies and 
small children on board and my un fraternal little 
jjrairi e-waifs did not see why every rattle and doll and 


314 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


automatic toy of their little fellow travelers and sis- 
ter tourists shouldn’t promptly become their own pri- 
vate property. And traveling with twins not yet a 
year old is scarcely conducive to rest. 

And yet, for all the worry and tumult, I found a 
new peace creeping into my soul. It was the first sight 
of the Rockies, I think, which brought the change. 
I’d grown tired of living on a billiard-table, without 
quite knowing it, tired of the trimly circumscribed 
monotony of material life, of the isolating flat conten- 
tion against hunger and want. But the mountains 
took me out of myself. They were Peter’s windmill, 
raised to the Nth power. They loomed above me, 
seeming to say : “We are timeless. You, puny one, can 
live but a day.” They stood there as they had stood 
from the moment God first whispered: “Let there be 
light” — and there was light. But no, I’m wrong 
there, as Peter would very promptly have told me, for 
it was only in the Cambrian Period that the corner- 
stone of the Rockies was laid. The geologic clock 
ticked out its centuries until the swamps of the Coal 
Period were full of Peter’s Oldest Inhabitants in the 
form of Dinosaurs and then came the Cretaceous Pe- 
riod and the Great Architect looked down and bade 
the Rockies arise, and tooled them into beauty with 
His blue-green glaciers and His singing rivers, and 
touched the lordliest peaks with wine-glow and filled 
the azure valleys with music and peace. And we 


THE PRAPRIE MOTHER 


315 


threaded along those valley-sides on our little ribbons 
of steel, skirted the shouting rivers and plunged into 
tiny twisted tubes of darkness, emerging again into 
the light and once more hearing the timeless giants, 
with their snow-white heads against the sunset, repeat 
their whisper: “We live and are eternal. Ye, who fret 
about our feet, dream for a day, and are forgotten !” 

But we seemed to be stepping out into a new world, 
by the time we got to Pasadena. It was a summery 
and flowery and holiday world, and it impressed me as 
being solely and scrupulously organized for pleasure. 
Yet all minor surprises were submerged in the biggest 
surprise of Peter’s bungalow, which is really more 
like a chateau , and strikes me as being singularly like 
Peter himself, not amazingly impressive to look at, 
perhaps, but hiding from the world a startingly rich 
and luxurious interior. The house itself, half hidden 
in shrubbery, is of weather-stained stucco, and looks 
at first sight a little gloomy, with the patina of time 
upon it. But it is a restful change from the spick- 
and-spanness of the near-by millionaire colony, so elo- 
quent of the paint-brush and the lawn-valet’s shears, 
so smug and new and strident in its paraded opulence. 
Peter’s gardens, in fact, are a rather careless riot of 
color and line, a sort of achieved genteel roughness, 
like certain phases of his house, as though the wave of 
refinement driven too high had broken and tumbled 
over on itself. 


316 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


The house, which is the shape of an “E” without 
the middle stroke, has a green-sodded patio between 
the two wings, with a small fountain and a stained 
marble basin at the center. There are shade-trees and 
date-palms and shrubs and Romanesque-looking stone 
seats about narrow walks, for this is the only really 
formalized portion of the entire property. This leads 
off into a grove and garden, a confusion of flowers and 
trees where I’ve already been able to spot out a num- 
ber of orange trees, some of them well fruited, several 
lemon and fig trees, a row of banana trees, or plants, 
whichever they should be called, besides pepper and 
palm and acacia and a long-legged double-file of euca- 
lyptus at the rear. And in between is a pergola and 
a mixture of mimosa and wistaria and tamarisk and 
poppies and trellised roses and one woody old gera- 
nium with a stalk like a crab-apple trunk and growth 
enough to cover half a dozen prairie hay-stacks. 

But, as I’ve already implied, it was the inside of 
the house that astonished me. It is much bigger than 
it looks and is crowded with the most gorgeous old 
things in copper and brass and leather and mahogany 
that I ever saw under one roof. It has three open 
fireplaces, a huge one of stone in the huge living-room, 
and rough-beamed ceilings of redwood, and Spanish 
tiled floors, and chairs upholstered with cowhide with 
the ranch-brand still showing in the tanned leather, 
and tables of Mexican mahogany set in redwood 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


317 


frames, and several convenient little electric heaters 
which can be carried from room to room as they are 
needed. 

Pinshaw, Peter’s gardener and care-taker, had 
before our arrival picked several clumps of violets, 
with perfume like the English violets, and the house 
was aired and everything waiting and ready when we 
came, even to two bottles of certified milk in the ice- 
box for the babies and half a dozen Casaba melons for 
their elders. My one disturbing thought is that it 
will be a hard house to live up to. But Struthers, 
who is not untouched with her folie de grandeur , has 
the slightly flurried satisfaction of an exile who has at 
last come into her own. One of the first things I 
must do, however, is to teach my kiddies to respect 
Peter’s belongings. In one cabinet of books, which 
is locked, I have noticed several which are by “Peter 
Ketley” himself. Yet that name meant nothing to me, 
when I met it out on the prairie and humiliated its 
owner by converting him into one of my hired hands. 
Ce monde est plein de fous. 


Monday the Sixteenth 


This is a great climate for meditation. And I have 
been meditating. Back at Alabama Ranch, I suppose, 
there’s twenty degrees of frost and a northwest wind 
like a search-warrant. Here there’s a pellucid blue 
sky, just enough breeze to rustle the bamboo-fronds 
behind me, and a tall girl in white lawn, holding a pale 
green parasol over her head and meandering slowly 
along the sun-steeped boulevard, which smells of 
hot tar. 

I’ve been sitting here staring down that boulevard, 
with the strong light making me squint a little. I’ve 
been watching the two rows of date-palms along the 
curb, with their willow-plume head-dress stirring lazily 
in the morning breeze. Well back from the smooth 
and shining asphalt, as polished as ebony with its oil- 
drip and tire-wear, is a row of houses, some shingled 
and awninged, some Colonial-Spanish, and stuccoed 
and bone-white in the sun, some dark-wooded and vine- 
draped and rose-grown, but all immaculate and fin- 
ished and opulent. The street is very quiet, but half- 
way down the block I can see a Jap gardener in brown 
denim sedately watering a well-barbered terrace. Still 
318 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


319 


farther away, somebody, in one of the deep-shadowed 
porches, is tinkling a ukelele, and somebody that I 
can’t see is somewhere beating a rug. I can see a little 
rivulet of water that flows sparkling down the 
asphalted runnel of the curb. Then the clump of 
bamboos back by Peter’s bedroom window rustles 
crisply again and is quiet and the silence is broken by 
a nurse-maid calling to a child sitting in a toy motor- 
wagon. Then a touring-car purrs past, with the sun 
flashing on its polished metal equipment, and the toy 
motor child being led reluctantly homeward by the 
maid cries shrilly, and in the silence that ensues I can 
hear the faint hiss of a spray-nozzle that builds a 
transient small rainbow just beyond the trellis of 
Cherokee roses from which a languid white petal falls, 
from time to time. 

It’s a dol c e- far Client e day* as all the days seem to 
be here, and the best that I can do is sit and brood like 
a Plymouth Rock with a full crop. But I’ve been 
thinking things over. And I’ve come to several con- 
clusions. 

One is that I’m not so contented as I thought I was 
going to be. I am oppressed by a shadowy feeling of 
in some way sailing under false colors. I am also 
hounded by an equally shadowy impression that I’m 
a convalescent. Yet I find myself vulgarly healthy, 
my kiddies have all acquired a fine coat of tan, and 
only Struthers is slightly off her feed, having acquired 


320 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


a not unmerited attack of cholera morbus from over- 
indulgence in Casaba melon. But I keep wondering if 
Dinky-Dunk is getting the right sort of things* to eat, 
if he’s lonely, and what he does in his spare time. 

And another conclusion I’ve come to is that men, 
much as I hate to admit it, are built of a stronger 
fiber than women. They seem able to stand shock 
better than the weaker sex. They are not so apt to 
go down under defeat, to take the full count, as I 
have done. For I still have to face the fact that I 
was a failure. Then I turned tail and fled from the 
scene of my collapse. That flight, it is true, has 
brought me a certain brand of peace, but it is not an 
enduring peace, for you can’t run away from what’s 
in your own heart. And already I’m restless and ill- 
at-ease. It’s not so much that I’m dissatisfied; it’s 
more that I’m unsatisfied. There still seems to be 
something momentous left out of the plan of things. 
I have the teasing feeling of confronting something 
which is still impending, which is being withheld, 
which I can not reach out for, no matter how I try, 
until the time is ripe. . . . Those rustling bam- 

boos so close to the room where I sleep have begun 
to bother me so much that I’m migrating to a new 
bedroom to-night. “There’s never anything without 
something !” 


Tuesday the Twenty-fourth 


Little Dinky-Dunk has adventured into illicit 
knowledge of his first orange from the bough. It was 
one of Peter’s low-hanging Valencias, and seems to 
have left no ill-effects, though I prefer that all inside 
matter be carefully edited before consumption by that 
small Red. So Struthers hereafter must stand the 
angel with the flaming sword and guard the gates that 
open upon that tree of forbidden fruit. Her own 
colic, by the way, is a thing of the past, and at pres- 
ent she’s extremely interested in Pinshaw, who, she 
tells me, was once a cabinet-maker in England, and 
came out to California for his health. Struthers, as 
usual, is attempting to reach the heart of her new vic- 
tim by way of the stomach, and Pinshaw, apparently, 
is not unappreciative, since he appears a little more 
punctually at his watering and raking and gardening 
and has his ears up like a rabbit for the first inkling 
of his lady-love’s matutinal hand-out. And poor old 
Whinstane Sandy, back at Alabama Ranch, is still 
making sheep’s eyes at the patches which Struthers 
once sewed on his breeks, like as not, and staring with 
a moonish smile at the atrabilious photograph which 
321 


322 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


the one camera-artist of Buckhorn made of Struthers 
and my three pop-eyed kiddies. . . . 

These are, without exception, the friendliest people 
I have ever known. The old millionaire lumberman 
from Bay City, who lives next door to me, pushes 
through the hedge with platefuls of green figs and 
tid-bits from his gardens, and delightful girls whose 
names I don’t even know come in big cars and ask to 
take little Dinkie off for one of their lawn fetes. It 
even happened that a movie-actor — who, I later dis- 
covered, was a drug-addict — insisted on accompany- 
ing me home and informed me on the way that I had 
a dream of a face for camera-work. It quite set me 
up, for all its impertinence, until I learned to my sor- 
row that it had flowered out of nothing more than an 
extra shot in the arm. 

They are a friendly and companionable folk, and 
they’d keep me on the go all the time if I’d let ’em. 
But I’ve only had energy enough to run over to Los 
Angeles twice, though there are a dozen or two people 
I must look up in that more frolicsome suburb. But 
I can’t get away from the feeling, the truly rural feel- 
ing, that I’m among strangers. I can’t rid myself of 
the extremely parochial impression that these people 
are not my people. And there’s a valetudinarian 
aspect to the place which I find slightly depressing. 
For this seems to be the one particular point where 
the worn-out old money-maker comes to die, and the 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


323 

antique ladies with asthma struggle for an extra year 
or two of the veranda rocking-chair, and rickety old 
beaux sit about in Panamas and white flannels and 
listen to the hardening of their arteries. And I 
haven’t quite finished with life yet — not if I know it — 
not by a long shot ! 

But one has to be educated for idleness, I find, 
almost as much as for industry. I knew the trick 
once, but I’ve lost the hang of it. The one thing that 
impresses me, on coming straight from prairie life 
to a city like this, is how much women-folk can have 
done for them without quite knowing it. The machin- 
ery of life here is so intricate and yet so adequate that 
it denudes them of all the normal and primitive activi- 
ties of their grandmothers, so they have to invent 
troubles and contrive quite unnecessary activities to 
keep from being bored to extinction. Everything 
seems to come to them ready-made and duly pre- 
pared, their bread, their light and fuel and water, their 
meat and milk. All that, and the daily drudgery it 
implies, is made ready and performed beyond their 
vision, and they have no balky pumps to prime and no 
fires to build, and they’d probably be quite disturbed 
to think that their roasts came from a slaughter-house 
with bloody floors and that their breakfast rolls, in- 
stead of coming ready-made into the world, are mixed 
and molded in bake-rooms where men work sweating 
by night, stripped to the waist, like stokers. 


Wednesday the Second 


Dinky-Dunk’s letter, which reached me Monday, 
was very short and almost curt. It depressed me for 
a day. I tried to fight against that feeling, when it 
threatened to return yesterday, and was at Peter’s 
piano shouting to the kiddies: 

“Coon, Coon, Coon, I wish my color’d fade ! 

Coon, Coon, Coon, I’d like a different shade!” 

when Struthers carried in to me, with a sort of tri- 
umphant and tight-lipped I-told-you-so air, a copy of 
the morning’s Los Angeles Examiner. She had it 
folded so that I found myself confronting a picture 
of Lady Alicia Newland, Lady Alicia in the “Teddy- 
Bear” suit of an aviator, with a fur-lined leather 
jacket and helmet and heavy gauntlets and leggings 
and the same old audacious look out of the quietly 
smiling eyes, which were squinting a little because of 
the sunlight. 

Lady Allie, I found on perusing the letter-press, 
had been flying with some of the North Island officers 
down in San Diego Bay. And now she and the Right 
Honorable Lieutenant-Colonel B rereton Ainsley- 
324 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


325 


Brook, of the British Imperial Commission to Canada, 
were to attempt a flight to Kelly Field Number Two, 
at San Antonio, in Texas, in a De Haviland machine. 
She had told the Examiner reporter who had caught 
her as she stood beside a naval sea-plane, that she 
“loved” flying and loved taking a chance and that her 
worst trouble was with nose-bleed, which she’d get 
over in time, she felt sure. And if the Texas flight 
was a success she would try to arrange for a flight 
down to the Canal at the same time that the Pacific 
fleet comes through from Colon. 

“Isn’t that ’er, all over?” demanded Struthers, for- 
getting her place and her position and even her aspi- 
rate in the excitement of the moment. But I handed 
back the paper without comment. For a day, how- 
ever, Lady Allie has loomed large in my thoughts. 


! Sunday the Thirteenth 


It will be two weeks to-morrow since I’ve had a line 
from Dinky-Dunk. The world about me is a world 
of beauty, but I’m 'worried and restless and Edna 
Millay’s lines keep running through my head: 

“ . . . East and West will pinch the heart 

That can not keep them pushed apart; 

And he whose soul is flat — the sky 
Will cave in on him by and by !” 


326 


Wednesday the Sixteenth 


Peter has written to me saying that unless he hears 
from me to the contrary he thinks he can arrange to 
“run through” to the Coast in time for the Rose 
Tournament here on New Year’s Day. He takes 
the trouble to explain that he’ll stay at the Alexandria 
in Los Angeles, so there’ll be no possible disturbance 
to me and my family routine. 

That’s so like Peter! 

But there’s been no word from Dinky-Dunk. The 
conviction is growing in my mind that he’s not at 
Alabama Ranch. 


Monday the Twenty-first 


A letter has just come to me this morning from 
Whinstane Sandy, written in lead-pencil. It said, 
with an orthography all its own, that Duncan had 
been in bed for two weeks with what they thought was 
pneumonia, but was up again and able to eat some- 
thing, and not to worry. It seemed a confident and 
cheerful message at first, but the oftener I read it 
the more worried I became. So one load was taken 
off my heart only to make room for another. My first 
decision was to start north at once, to get back to 
Alabama Ranch and my Dinky-Dunk as fast as steam 
could take me. I was still the sharer of his joys and 
sorrows, and ought to be with him w T hen things were 
at their worst. But on second thought it didn’t seem 
quite fair to the kiddies, to dump them from mid- 
summer into shack-life and a sub-zero climate. And 
always, always, always, there were the children to be 
considered. So I wired Ed Sherman, the station- 
agent at Buckhorn, asking him to send out a message 
to Duncan, saying I was waiting for him in Pasa- 
dena and to come at once. 

I wonder what his answer will be? It’s surrender, 

328 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


329 


on my part. It’s capitulation, and Dinky-Dunk, of 
course, will recognize that fact. Or he ought to. But 
it’s not this I’m worrying over. It’s Duncan himself, 
and his health. It gives me a guilty feeling. . . . 

I once thought that I was made to heal hearts. But 
about all I can do, I find, is to bruise them. 


Thursday the Twenty-fourth 


A telegram of just one word has come from 
Huncan, dated at Calgary. It said: “Coming.” I 
could feel a little tremble in my knees as I read it. 
He must be better, or he’d never be able to travel. 
To-morrow will be Christmas Hay, but we’ve decided 
to postpone all celebration until the kiddies’ daddy 
is on the scene. It will never seem much like Christ- 
mas to us Eskimos, at eighty-five in the shade. And 
we’re temporarily subduing that red-ink day to the 
eyes of the children by carefully secreting in one of 
Peter’s clothes-closets each and every present that has 
come for them. 


330 


Sunday the Twenty -seventh 


Dinky-Dunk is here. He arrived this morning, 
and we were all at the station in our best bib-and- 
tucker and making a fine show of being offhanded and 
light-hearted. But when I saw the porter helping 
down my Diddums, so white-faced and weak and tired- 
looking, something swelled up and burst just under 
my floating ribs and for a moment I thought my heart 
had had a blow-out like a tire and stopped working 
for ever and ever. Heaven knows I held my hands 
tight, and tried to be cheerful, but in spite of every- 
thing I could do, on the way home, I couldn’t stop the 
tears from running slowly down my cheeks. They 
kept running and running, as though I had nothing 
to do with it, exactly as a wound bleeds. The poor 
man, of course, was done out by the long trip. He 
was just blooey , and saved himself from being pitiful 
by shrinking back into a shell of chalky-faced self- 
sufficiency. He has said very little, and has eaten 
nothing, but had a sleep this afternoon for a couple 
of hours, out in the patio on a chaise-longue . It hurt 
him, I think, to find his own children look at him with 
such cold and speculative eyes. But he has changed 
331 


'332 THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 

shockingly since they last saw him. And they have 
so much to fill up their little lives. They haven’t yet 
reached the age when life teaches them they’d better 
stick to what’s given them, even though there’s a bit- 
ter tang to its sweetness! 


Wednesday the Thirtieth 


It is incredible, what three days of rest and forced 
feeding at my implacable hands, have done for Dinky- 
Dunk. He is still a little shaky on his pins, if he 
walks far, and the noonday sun makes him dizzy, but 
his eyes don’t look so much like saucers and I haven’t 
heard the trace of a cough from him all to-day. Ill- 
ness, of course, is not romantic, but it plays its alto- 
gether too important part in life, and has to be faced. 
And there is something so disturbingly immuring and 
depersonalizing about it ! Dinky-Dunk appears 
rather in a world by himself. Only once, so far, has 
; he seemed to step back to our every-day old world. 
That was when he wandered into the Blue Room in 
the East Wing where little Dinkie has been sleeping. 
I was seated beside his little lordship’s bed singing: 

“The little pigs sleep with their tails curled up,” 

and when that had been exhausted, rambling on to 

“The sailor being both tall and slim, 

The lady fell in love with him,” 

when pater familias wandered in and inquired, “Why- 
fore the cabaret?” 


333 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


334 

I explained that Dinkie, since coming south, had 
seemed to demand an even-song or two before slip- 
ping off. 

“I see that I’ll have to take our son in hand,” 
announced Dinky-Dunk — but there was just the 
shadow of a smile about his lips as he went slowly out 
and closed the door after him. 

To-night, when I told Dinky-Dunk that Peter 
would in all likelihood be here to-morrow, he listened 
without batting an eyelash. But he asked if I’d mind 
handing him a cigarette, and he studied my face long 
and intently. I don’t know what he saw there, or 
what he concluded, for I did my best to keep it as non- 
committal as possible. If there is any move, it must 
be from him. That sour-inked Irishman called Shaw 
has said that women are the wooers in this world. A 
lot he knows about it! . . . Yet something has 

happened, in the last half-hour, which both disturbs 
and puzzles me. When I was unpacking Dinky- 
Dunk’s second trunk, which had stood neglected for 
almost four long days, I came across the letter which 
I thought I’d put away in the back of the ranch 
ledger and had failed to find. . . . And he had 

it, all the time ! 

The redoubtable Struthers, it must be recorded, 
to-day handed me another paper, and almost as tri- 
umphantly as the first one. She’d picked it up on her 
way home from the druggist’s, where she went for 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


335 


aspirin for Dinky-Dunk. On what was labeled its 
“Woman’s Page” was yet another photographic 
reproduction of the fair Lady Allie in aviation togs 
and a head-line which read: “Insists On Tea Above 
The Clouds.” But I plainly disappointed the expect- 
ant Struthers by promptly handing the paper back 
to her and by declining to make any comment. 


Thursday the Thirty-first 


Peter walked in on us to-day, a little less spick and 
span, Pm compelled to admit, than I had expected of 
one in his position, but as easy and unconcerned as 
though he had dropped in from across the way for a 
cigarette and a cup of tea. And I played up to that 
pose bj - having Struthers wheel the tea-wagon out into 
the patio, where we gathered about it in a semicircle, 
as decorously as though we were sitting in a curate’s 
garden to talk over the program for the next meeting 
of the Ladies’ Auxiliary. 

There we sat, Dinky-Dunk, my husband who was 
in love with another woman; Peter, my friend, who 
was in love with me, and myself, who was too busy 
bringing up a family to be in love with anybody. 
There we sat in that beautiful garden, in that balmy 
and beautiful afternoon sunlight, with the bamboos 
whispering and a mocking-bird singing from its place 
on the pepper-tree, stirring our small cups and saying 
“Lemon, please,” or “Just one lump, thank you.” It 
may not be often, but life does occasionally surprise 
us by being theatrical. For I could not banish from 
my bones an impression of tremendous reservations, 
336 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


337 


of guarded waiting and watching from every point of 
that sedate and quiet-mannered little triangle. Yet 
for only one moment had I seen it come to the front. 
That was during the moment when Dinky-Dunk and 
Peter first shook hands. On both faces, for that 
moment, I caught the look with which two knights 
measure each other. Peter, as he lounged back in his 
wicker chair and produced his familiar little briar 
pipe, began to remind me rather acutely of that 
pensive old picador in Zuloaga’s The Victim of The 
Fete , the placid and plaintive and only vaguely hope- 
ful knight on his bony old Rosinante, not quite igno- 
rant of the fact that he must forage on to other fields 
and look for better luck in newer ventures, yet not 
quite forgetful that life, after all, is rather a blithe 
adventure and that the man who refuses to surrender 
his courage, no matter what whimsical turns the 
adventure may take, is still to be reckoned the con- 
queror. But later on he was jolly enough and direct 
enough, when he got to showing Dinky-Dunk his 
books and curios. I suppose, at heart, he was about 
as interested in those things as an aquarium angel- 
fish is in a Sunday afternoon visitor. But if it was 
pretense, and nothing more, there was very actual 
kindliness in it. And there was nothing left for me 
but to sit tight, and refill the little lacquered gold cups 
when necessary, and smile non-committally when 
Dinky-Dunk explained that my idea of Heaven was a 


338 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


place where husbands were served en brochette , and 
emulate the Priest and the Levite by passing by on 
the other side when Peter asked me if I’d ever heard 
that the West was good for mules and men but hard 
on horses and women. And it suddenly struck me as 
odd, the timidities and reticences which nature imposes 
on our souls. It seemed so ridiculous that the three 
of us couldn’t sit there and unbosom our hearts of 
what was hidden away in them, that we couldn’t be 
open and honest and aboveboard and say just what 
we felt and thought, that we couldn’t quietly talk 
things out to an end and find where each and all of 
us stood. But men and women are not made that way. 
Otherwise, I suppose, life would be too Edenic, and 
we’d part company with a very old and venerable 
interest in Paradise! 


Saturday the Second 


Peter had arranged to come for us with a motor- 
car and carry us all off to the Rose Tournament yes- 
terday morning, “for I do want to be sitting right 
next to that little tike of yours,” he explained, mean- 
ing Dinkie, “when he bumps into his first brass band !” 

But little Dinkie didn’t hear his brass band, and 
we didn’t go to the Rose Tournament, although it was 
almost at our doors and some eighty thousand crowded 
automobiles foregathered here from the rest of the 
state to get a glimpse of it. For Peter, who is stay- 
ing at the Greene here instead of at the Alexandria 
over in Los Angeles, presented himself before Pd even 
sat down to breakfast and before lazy old Dinky-Dunk 
was even out of bed. 

Peter, I noticed, had a somewhat hollow look about 
the eye, but I accepted it as nothing more than the 
after-effects of his long trip, and blithely commanded 
him to sit down and partake of my coffee. 

Peter, however, wasn’t thinking about coffee. 

“Pm afraid,” he began, “that I’m bringing you 
rather — rather bad news.” 

We stood for a moment with our gazes locked. He 

339 


*340 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


seemed appraising me, speculating on just what effect 
this message of his might have on me. 

“What is it?” I asked, with that forlorn tug at 
inner reserves which life teaches us to send over the 
wire as we grow older. 

“I’ve come,” explained Peter, “simply because this 
thing would have reached you a little later in your 
morning paper — and I hated the thought of having it 
spring out at you that way. So you won’t mind, will 
you? You’ll understand the motive behind the 
message?” 

“But what is it?” I repeated, a little astonished by 
this obliquity in a man customarily so direct. 

“It’s about Lady Newland,” he finally said. And 
the solemnity of his face rather frightened me. 

“She’s not dead?” I asked in a breath. 

Peter shook his head from side to side. 

“She’s been rather badly hurt,” he said, after sev- 
eral moments of silence. “Her plane was winged yes- 
terday afternoon by a navy flier over San Diego Bay. 
She didn’t fall, but it was a forced landing and her 
machine had taken fire before they could get her out 
of her seat.” 

“You mean she was burnt?” I cried, chilled by the 
horror of it. 

And, inapposite as it seemed, my thoughts flashed 
back to that lithe and buoyant figure, and then > the 
picture of it charred and scorched and suffering. 








She’s not dead?” I asked in a breath 






*The prairie mother 


341 


“Only Iier face,” was Peter’s quiet and very delib- 
erate reply. 

“Only her face,” I repeated, not quite understand- 
ing him. 

“The men from the North Bay field had her out a 
minute or two after she landed. But practically the 
whole plane was afire. Her heavy flying coat and 
gauntlets saved her body and hands. But her face 
was unprotected. She — ” 

“Do you mean she’ll be disfigured?” I asked, remem- 
bering the loveliness of that face with its red and wil- 
ful lips and its ever-changing tourmaline eyes. 

“I’m afraid so,” was Peter’s answer. “But I’ve 
been wiring, and you’ll be quite safe in telling your 
husband that she’s in no actual danger. The Marine 
Plospital officials have acknowledged that no flame was 
inhaled, that it’s merely temporary shock, and, of 
course, the face-burn.” 

“But what can they do?” I asked, in little more than 
a whisper. 

“They’re trying the new ambersine treatment, and 
later on, I suppose, they can rely on skin-grafting and 
facial surgery,” Peter explained to me. 

“Is it that bad?” I asked, sitting down in one of the 
empty chairs, for the mere effort to vision any such 
disfigurement had brought a Channel-crossing and 
Calais-packet feeling to me. 

“It’s very sad,” said Peter, more ill-at-ease than 


342 THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 

I’d ever seen him before. “But there’s positively no 
danger, remember. It won’t be so bad as your morn- 
ing paper will try to make it out. They’ve sensa- 
tionalized it, of course. That’s why I wanted to be 
here first, and give you the facts. They are distress- 
ing enough, God knows, without those yellow reporters 
working them over for wire consumption.” 

I was glad that Peter didn’t offer to stay, didn’t 
even seem to wish to stay. I wanted quietness and 
time to think the thing over. Dinky-Dunk, I realized, 
would have to be told, and told at once. It would, of 
course, be a shock to him. And it would be something 
more. It would be a sudden crowding to some final 
issue of all those possibilities which lay like spring- 
traps beneath the under-brush of our indifference. 
I had no way of knowing what it was that had 
attracted him to Lady Alicia. Beauty of face, of 
course, must have been a factor in it. And that beauty 
was now gone. But love, according to the Prophets 
and the Poets, overcometh all things. And in her very 
helplessness, it was only too plain to me, his Cousin 
Allie might appeal to him in a more personal and more 
perilous way. My Diddums himself, of late, had 
appealed more to me in his weakness and his unhappi- 
ness than in his earlier strength and triumph. There 
was a time, in fact, when I had almost grown to hate 
his successes. And yet he was my husband. He was 
mine . And it was a human enough instinct to fight 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


343 


for wliat was one’s own. But that wild-bird part of 
man known as his will could never be caged and 
chained. If somewhere far off it beheld beauty and 
nobility it must be free to wing its way where it 
wished. The only bond that held it was the bond of 
free-giving and goodness. And if it abjured such 
things as that, the sooner the flight took place and 
the colors were shown, the better. If on the home- 
bough beside him nested neither beauty nor nobility, 
it was only natural that he should wander a-field for 
what I had failed to give him. And now, in this final 
test, I must not altogether fail him. For once in my 
life, I concluded, I had to be generous. 

So I waited until Dinky-Dunk emerged. I waited, 
deep in thought, while he splashed like a sea-lion in 
his bath, and called out to Struthers almost gaily for 
his glass of orange- juice, and shaved, and opened and 
closed drawers, and finished dressing and came out in 
his cool-looking suit of cricketer’s flannel, so immacu- 
late and freshly-pressed that one would never dream 
it had been bought in England and packed in moth- 
balls for four long years. 

I heard him asking for the kiddies while I was still 
out in the patio putting the finishing touches to his 
breakfast-table, and his grunt that was half a sigh 
when he learned that they’d been sent off before he’d 
had a glimpse of them. And I could see him inhale a 
lungful of the balmy morning air as he stood in the 


344 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


open doorway and stared, not without approval, at 
me and the new-minted day. 

“Why the clouded brow, Lady-Bird?” he demanded 
as he joined me atjthe little wicker table. 

“I’ve had some rather disturbing news,” I told 
him, wondering just how to begin. 

“The kiddies?” he asked, stopping short. 

I stared at him closely as I shook my head in 
answer to that question. He looked leaner and frailer 
and less robustious than of old. But in my heart of 
hearts I liked him that way. It left him the helpless 
and unprotesting victim of that run-over maternal 
instinct of mine which took w T ayward joy in mothering 
what it couldn’t master. It had brought him a little 
closer to me. But that contact, I remembered, was 
perhaps to be only something of the moment. 

“Dinky-Dunk,” I told him as quietly as I could, 
“I want you to go down to San Diego and see Lady 
Aliie.” 

It was a less surprised look than a barricaded one 
that came into his eyes. 

“Why ?” he asked as he slowly seated himself across 
the table from me. 

“Because I think she needs you,” I found the cour- 
age to tell him. 

“Why?” he asked still again. 

“There has been an accident,” I told him. 

“What sort of accident?” he quickly inquired, with 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


345 

one hand arrested as he went to shake out his table- 
napkin. 

“It was an air-ship accident. And Lady Allie’s 
been hurt.” 

“Badly?” he asked, as our glances met. 

“Not badly, in one way,” I explained to him. 
“She’s not in any danger, I mean. But her plane 
caught fire, and she’s been burned about the face.” 

Plis lips parted slightly, as he sat staring at me. 
And slowly up into his colorless face crept a blighted 
look, a look which brought a vague yet vast unhap- 
piness to me as I sat contemplating it. 

“Do you mean she’s disfigured,” he asked, “that 
it’s something she’ll always — ” 

“I’m afraid so,” I said, when he did not finish his 
sentence. 

He sat looking down at his empty plate for a long 
time. 

“And you want me to go?” he finally said. 

“Yes,” I told him. 

He was silent for still another ponderable space of 
time. 

“But do you understand — ” he began. And for 
the second time he didn’t finish his sentence. 

“I understand,” I told him, doing my best to sit 
steady under his inquisitorial eye. Then he looked 
down at the empty plate again. 

“All right,” he said at last. Pie spoke in a quite 


348 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


flat and colorless tone. But it masked a decision 
which we both must have recognized as being momen- 
tous. And I knew, without saying anything further, 
that he would gc 


Sunday the Third 


Dinky-Dunk left Friday night and got back early 
this morning before I was up. This naturally sur- 
prised me. But what surprised me more was the way 
he looked. He was white and shaken and drawn about 
the eyes. He seemed so wretched that I couldn’t help 
feeling sorry for him. 

“She wouldn't see me !” was all he said as I stopped 
him on the way to his room. 

But he rather startled me, fifteen minutes later, by 
calling up the Greene and asking for Peter. And 
before half an hour had dragged past Peter appeared 
in person. He ignored the children, and apparently 
avoided me, and went straight out to the pergola, 
where he and Dinky-Dunk fell to pacing slowly up 
and down, with the shadows dappling their white- 
clad shoulders like leopards as they walked up and 
down, up and down, as serious and solemn as two min- 
isters of state in a national crisis. And something, I 
scarcely knew what, kept me from going out and 
joining them. 

It was Peter himself who finally came in to me.. 
He surprised me, in the first place, by shaking hands. 

347 


348 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


He did it with that wistful wandering-picador smile 
of his on his rather Zuloagaish face. 

“I’ve got to say good-by,” I found him saying 
to me. 

“Peter!” I called out in startled protest, trying to 
draw back so I could see him better. But he kept 
my hand. 

“I’m going east to-night,” he quite casually 
announced. “But above all things I want you and 
your Dinky-Dunk to hang on here as long as you can. 
He needs it. I’m stepping out. No, I don’t mean 
that, exactly, for I’d never stepped in. But it’s a fine 
thing, in this world, for men and women to be real 
friends. And I know, until we shuffle off, that we’re 
going to be that !” 

“Peter !” I cried again, trying not to choke up with 
the sudden sense of deprivation that was battering my 
heart to pieces. And the light in faithful old Peter’s 
eyes didn’t make it any easier. 

But he dropped my hand, of a sudden, and went 
stumbling rather awkardly over the Spanish tiling as 
he passed out to the waiting car. I watched him as 
he climbed into it, stiffly yet with a show of careless 
bravado, for all the world like the lean-jowled knight 
of the vanished fete mounting his bony old Rosinante. 

It was nearly half an hour later that Dinky-Dunk 
came into the cool-shadowed living-room where I was 
making a pretense of being busy at cutting down 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


349 


some of Dinkie’s rompers for Pee-Wee, who most 
assuredly must soon bid farewell to skirts. 

“Will you sit down, please?” he said with an 
abstracted sort of formality. For he’d caught me on 
the wing, half-way back from the open window, where 
I’d been glancing out to make sure Struthers was on 
guard with the children. 

My face was a question, I suppose, even when I 
didn’t speak. 

“There’s something I want you to be very quiet 
and courageous about,” was my husband’s none too 
tranquillizing beginning. And I could feel my pulse 
quicken. 

“What is it?” I asked, wondering just what women 
should do to make themselves quiet and courageous. 

“It’s about Allie,” answered my husband, speak- 
ing so slowly and deliberately that it sounded unnat- 
ural. “She shot herself last night. She — she killed 
herself, with an army revolver she’d borrowed from 
a young officer down there.” 

I couldn’t quite understand, at first. The words 
seemed like half-drowned things my mind had to work 
over and resuscitate and coax back into life. 

“This is terrible!” I said at last, feebly, foolishly, 
as the meaning of it all filtered through my none too 
active brain. 

“It’s terrible for me,” acknowledged Dinky-Dunk, 
with a self-pity which I wasn’t slow to resent. 


350 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“But why aren’t you there?” I demanded. “Why 
aren’t you there to keep a little decency about the 
thing? Why aren’t you looking after what’s left 
of her?” 

Dinky-Dunk’s eye evaded mine, but only for a 
moment. 

“ Colonel Ainsley-Brook is coming back from Wash- 
ington to take possession of the remains,” he explained 
with a sort of dry-lipped patience, “and take them 
home.” 

“But why should an outsider like — ” 

Dinky-Dunk stopped me with a gesture. 

“He and Allie were married, a little over three weeks 
ago,” my husband quietly informed me. And for 
the second time I had to work life into what seemed 
limp and sodden words. 

“Did you know about that?” I asked. 

“Yes, Allie wrote to me about it, at the time,” he 
replied with a sort of coerced candor. “She said it 
seemed about the only thing left to do.” 

“Why should she say that?” 

Dinky-Dunk stared at me with something strangely 
like a pleading look in his haggard eye. 

“Wouldn’t it be better to keep away from all that, 
at a time like this ?” he finally asked. 

“No,” I told him, “this is the time we can't keep 
away from it. She wrote you that because she was in 
love with you. Isn’t that the truth?” 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


351 


Dinky-Dunk raised his hand, as though he were 
attempting a movement of protest, and then dropped 
it again. His eyes, I noticed, were luminous with 
a sort of inward-burning misery. But I had no 
intention of being merciful. I had no chance of being 
merciful. It was like an operation without ether, but 
it had to be gone through with. It had to be cut out, 
in some way, that whole cancerous growth of hate 
and distrust. 

“Isn’t that the truth?” I repeated. 

“Oh, Tabby, don’t turn the knife in the wound!” 
cried Dinky-Dunk, with his face more than ever 
pinched with misery. 

“Then it is a wound!” I proclaimed in dolorous 
enough triumph. “But there’s still another question, 
Dinky-Dunk, you must answer,” I went on, speaking 
as slowly and precisely as I could, as though delibera- 
tion in speech might in some way make clearer a mat- 
ter recognized as only too dark in spirit. “And it 
must be answered honestly, without any quibble as 
to the meaning of words. Were you in love with Lady 
Allie?” 

His gesture of repugnance, of seeming self-hate, 
was both a prompt and a puzzling one. 

“That’s the hideous, the simply hideous part of it 
all,” he cried out in a sort of listless desperation. 

“Why hideous?” I demanded, quite clear-headed, 
and quite determined that now or never the over- 


352 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


scored slate of suspicion should be wiped clean. I 
still forlornly and foolishly felt, I suppose, that he 
might yet usher before me some miraculously simple 
explanation that would wipe his scutcheon clean, that 
would put everything back to the older and happier 
order. But as I heard his deep-wrung cry of “Oh, 
what’s the good of all this?” I knew that life wasn’t 
so romantic as we’re always trying to make it. 

“I’ve got to know,” I said, as steel-cold as a 
surgeon. 

“But can’t you see that it’s — that it’s worse than 
revolting to me?” he contended, with the look of a man 
harried beyond endurance. 

“Why should it be ?” I exacted. 

He sank down in the low chair with the ranch- 
brand on its leather back. It was an oddly child-like 
movement of collapse. But I daren’t let myself feel 
sorry for him. 

“Because it’s all so rottenly ignoble,” he said, with- 
out looking at me. 

“For whom?” I asked, trying to speak calmly. 

“For me — for you,” he cried out, with his head in 
his hands. “For you to have been faced with, I mean. 
It’s awful, to think that you’ve had to stand it!” He 
reached out for me, but I was too far away for him 
to touch. “Oh, Tabby, I’ve been such an awful rotter. 
And this thing that’s happened has just brought it 
home to me.” 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


353 

“Then you cared, that much?” I demanded, feel- 
ing the bottom of my heart fall out, for all the world 
like the floor of a dump-cart. 

“No, no; that’s the unforgivable part of it,” he 
cried in quick protest. “It’s not only that I did you a 
great wrong, Tabby, but I did her a worse one. I 
coolly exploited something that I should have at least 
respected. I manipulated and used a woman I should 
have been more generous with. There wasn’t even 
bigness in it, from my side of the game. I traded on 
that dead woman’s weakness. And my hands would 
be cleaner if I could come to you with the claim that 
I’d really cared for her, that I’d been swept off my 
feet, that passion had blinded me to the things I 
should have remembered.” He let his hands fall 
between his knees. Knowing him as the man of 
reticence that he was, it seemed an indescribably tragic 
gesture. And it struck me as odd, the next moment, 
that he should be actually sobbing. “Oh, my dear, 
my dear, the one thing I was blind to was your big- 
ness, was your goodness. The one thing I forgot was 
how true blue you could be.” 

I sat there staring at his still heaving shoulders, 
turning over what he had said, turning it over and 
over, like a park-squirrel with a nut. I found a great 
deal to think about, but little to say. 

“I don’t blame you for despising me,” Dinky-Dunk 
said, out of the silence, once more in control of himself. 


354 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


“I was thinking of her/ 9 I explained. And then I 
found the courage to look into my husband’s face. 
“No, Dinky-Dunk, I don’t despise you,” I told him, 
remembering that he was still a weak and shaken man. 
“But I pity you. I do indeed pity you. For it’s self- 
ishness, it seems to me, which costs us so much, in 
the end.” 

He seemed to agree with me, by a slow movement 
of the head. 

“That’s the only glimmer of hope I have,” he sur- 
prised me by saying. 

“But why hope from that? 99 I asked. 

“Because you’re so utterly without selfishness,” 
that deluded man cried out to me. “You were always 
that way, but I didn’t have the brains to see it. I 
never quite saw it until you sent me down to — to her." 
He came to a stop, and sat staring at the terra-cotta 
Spanish floor-tiles. “7 knew it w T as useless, tragically 
useless. You didn’t. But you were brave enough to 
let my weakness do its worst, if it had to. And that 
makes me feel that I’m not fit to touch you, that I’m 
not even fit to walk on the same ground with you !” 

I tried my best to remain judicial. 

“But this, Dinky-Dunk, isn’t being quite fair to 
either of us,” I protested, turning away to push in a 
hair-pin so that he wouldn’t see the tremble that I 
could feel in my lower lip. For an unreasonable and 
illogical and absurdly big wave of compassion for my 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


355 


poor old Dinky-Dunk was welling up through my 
tired body, threatening to leave me and all my make- 
believe dignity as wobbly as a street-procession Queen 
of Sheba on her circus-float. I was hearing, I knew, 
the words that I’d waited for, this many a month. 
I was at last facing the scene I’d again and again 
dramatized on the narrow stage of my woman’s imagi- 
nation. But instead of bringing me release, it brought 
me heart-ache; instead of spelling victory, it came 
involved with the thin humiliations of compromise. 
For things could never be the same again. The blot 
was there on the scutcheon, and could never be argued 
away. The man I loved had let the grit get into the 
bearings of his soul, had let that grit grind away life’s 
delicate surfaces without even knowing the wine of 
abandoned speed. He had been nothing better than 
the passive agent, the fretful and neutral factor, the 
cheated one without even the glory of conquest or 
the tang of triumph. But he had been saved for me. 
He was there within arm’s reach of me, battered, but 
with the wine-glow of utter contrition on his face. 

“Take me back, Babushka ,” I could hear his shaken 
voice imploring. “I don’t deserve it — but I can’t go 
on without you. I can’t! I’ve had enough of hell. 
And I need you more than anything else in this 
world !” 

That, I had intended telling him, wasn’t playing 
quite fair. But when he reached out his hands toward 


356 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


me, exactly as I’ve seen his own Dinky do at night- 
fall when a darkening room left his little spirit 
hungry for companionship, something melted like an 
overlooked chocolate mousse in my crazy old maternal 
heart, and before I was altogether aware of it I’d let 
my hands slip over his shoulders as he knelt with his 
bowed head in my lap. The sight of his colorless and 
unhappy face with that indescribable homeless-dog 
look in his eyes was too much for me. I gave up. 
I hugged his head to my breast-bone as though it 
were my onty life-buoy in an empty and endless Atlan- 
tic and only stopped when I had to rub the end of my 
nose, which I couldn’t keep a collection of several big 
tears from tickling. 

“I’m a fool, Dinky-Dunk, a most awful fool,” I 
tried to tell him, when he gave me a chance to breathe 
again. “And I’ve got a temper like a bob-cat 1” 

“No, no, Beloved,” he protested, “it’s not foolish- 
ness — it’s nobility !” 

I couldn’t answer him, for his arms had closed 
about me again. “And I love you, Tabbie, I love you 
with every inch of my body!” 

Women are weak. And there is no such thing, so 
far as I know, as an altogether and utterly perfect 
man. So we must winnow strength out of our weak- 
ness, make the best of a bad bargain, and over-scroll 
the walls of our life-cell with the illusions which may 
come to mean as much as the stone and iron that 


THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


357 


imprison us. All we can do, we who are older and 
wiser, is wistfully to overlook the wobble where the 
meshed perfection of youth has been bruised and 
abused and loosened, tighten up the bearings, 

and keep as blithely as we can to the worn 

old road. For life, after all, is a turn-pike 

of concession deep-bedded with compromise. And 
our To-morrows are only our To-days over 

again. ... So Dinky-Dunk, who keeps say- 
ing in unexpected and intriguing ways that he can’t 
live without me, is trying to make love to me as he 
did in the old daj^s before he got salt-and-peppery 
above the ears. And I’m blockhead enough to believe 
him. I’m like an old shoe, I suppose, comfortable but 
not showy. Yet it’s the children we really have to 
think of. Our crazy old patch-work of the Past may 
be our own, but the Future belongs to them. There’s 
a heap of good, though, in my humble-eyed old 
Dinky-Dunk, too much good ever to lose him, what- 
ever may have happened in the days that are over. 


Sunday the Twenty-fourth 


1 Dinky-Dunk, whom I actually heard singing as he 
took his bath this morning, is exercising his paternal 
prerogative of training little Dinkie to go to bed 
without a light. He has peremptorily taken the mat- 
ter out of my hands, and is, of course, prodigiously 
solemn about it all. 

“I’ll show that young Turk who’s boss around this 
house !” he magisterially proclaims almost every night 
when the youthful wails of protest start to come from 
the Blue Room in the East Wing. 

And off he goes, with his Holbein’s Astronomer 
mouth set firm and the fiercest of frowns on his face. 

It had a tendency to terrify me, at first. But now I 
know what a colossal old fraud and humbug this same 
soft-hearted and granite-crusted specimen of human- 
ity can be. For last night, after the usual demon- 
stration, I slipped out to the Blue Room and found 
big Dunkie kneeling down beside little Dinkie’s bed, 
with Dinkie’s small hand softly enclosed in his dad’s 
big paw, and Dinkie’s yellow head nestled close 
against his dad’s salt-and-peppery pate. 

It made me gulp a little, for some reason or other. 

358 











Dinkie’s yellow head nestled close against his dad’s salt-and-pepper pate 



THE PRAIRIE MOTHER 


359 


So I tiptoed away, without letting my lord and master 
know I’d discovered the secret of that stern mastery 
of his. And later on Dinky-Dunk himself tiptoed 
into Peter’s study, farther down the same wing, so 
that he could, with a shadow of truth, explain that 
he’d been looking over some of the Spanish manu- 
scripts there, when I happened to ask him, on his 
return, just what had kept him away so long! 


THE END 




















